If you're a painter and you want people to know who you are and recognize your work, you've got to build some long-term value.

I think I'm good at amplifying an actor's strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.

To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.

If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

What are the stories you want people to tell about you?

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

They were like animals, men. They found too much eye contact threatening.

Prayer is your attempt to bring your will and desires in line with God’s will.

A dash of humor will only add intense gravity to the proceedings, even as a flash of lightning only makes midnight dreariness all the more impressive.

With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody's feelings

There is no more delightful hour in life than that of an unconfessed but mutual love.

Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one.

This is Not Another Revolution. This is a Civil Rights Movement

I think that in big-budget movies there's a lot of other stuff going on besides acting, like special effects.

Thanks to the greatest invention of recent years, the MP3-playing alarm clock, I can now choose the song that wakes me up in the morning.

One thought includes all thought, in the sense that a grain of sand includes the universe.