In a sense, I think a movie is really a little like a question and when you make it, that's when you get the answer.

I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.

An essential element of any art is risk. If you don't take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn't been seen before?

I used to love going into local hardware stores, to look at little things they made locally. Nowadays it's harder, though you can still do it in Vietnam.

I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.

There's nothing creative about living within your means.

Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.

We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.

You don't have to specialize - do everything that you love and then, at some time, the future will come together for you in some form.

If the movie works, nobody notices the mistakes... If the movie doesn't work, the only thing people notice are mistakes.

Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.

There is the sudden. There is the eventual. And in between, there is the living.

Even nowadays some people see me as a "vreemde eend in de bijt" [translated literally as the strange duck in the pond. In other words, an outsider].

It is an act of virtue to deceive and lie, when by such means the interest of the church might be promoted.

Christianity is not a law of bondage; and if it respect the hand of God which sometimes raises up tyrants, it draws up where obedience degenerates into guilty cowardice.

Our republic and its press will rise and fall together.

The simplest carbon dioxide removal approach is to plant a tree.

If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it's because I put the character first.

I would rather be a beggar and spend my money like a king, than be a king and spend money like a beggar.

We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order.