It's just an impulse, in some actors. You want to make the audience like you. That's the aim of the exercise.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

We tend to do period stuff because it helps make it one step removed from boring everyday reality.

Like any kind of writing, there are good days and frustrating days. But even frustrating days can be rewarding sometimes.

The mountain music... is compelling music in its own right, harking back to a time when music was a part of everyday life and not something performed by celebrities.

I was always interested in movies the way everyone is interested. That is, I liked to go to the movies

There aren't reasons why you like this song or this piece of music, or don't like it. It's just, it's either right or wrong, you know?

When the movie's done, you talk about either the score or source music over a particular scene, what might work. You just throw a piece of music over the scene, and we both listen to it.

Barton Fink is just too self-important as an artist to get much sympathy.

College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.

Humility is the most undervalued godly virtue.

Whereas the insufficiency of a love neither sustained nor supreme cannot be ignored, the same should not be taken as cause to avoid one's total spiritual contractual engagement to this world.

We are the recorders and reporters of facts - not the judges of the behaviors we describe.

One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.

...from schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are.

The truth will always have a market.

It will be a killer, and a chiller, and a thriller, when I get the gorilla in Manila.

I'm interested in adapting books and all sorts of things.

I sat back, allowing Wes's words to sink in. Then I responded, "I guess it's hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances.