Los Angeles functions for me as a kind of holy template. It is postwar America.

I realized that if I wanted to truly talk about vastness and the sublime and scale and the West - recurrent themes in my overall work - I needed to engage with the vast ocean that is Los Angeles.

... anybody who has spent time with cameras and photographs knows that images, like gravestone rubbings, are no more than impressions of the truth.

I struggle against photography. I struggle against the fact that it is silent, that it is just a piece of paper on the wall, often presented in a tedious white matt frame.

I come at a subject from a profoundly photographic level. I am not interested in pictures that ultimately don't work as pictures.

What better way to actually deal with L.A. than to get above it and engage with the horizontality and scale of the basin itself?

I have a profound passion for the act of flying. It's very freeing, with an intense physicality, but it also gives an Olympian, god's-eye view, which fuels a larger cerebral and structural analysis.

Flying was certainly formative for me; I have a deep and lasting ease with it as a result.

A fool's head never whitens.

If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape it would be the shape of a boomerang.

People love seeing people trying to change stuff.

I love the flow of the game. There’s a certain fluidity to basketball. I don’t enjoy watching baseball or football in the same way.

You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'

It's not easy to follow Jesus' example, and if you go to church it doesn't mean you're automatically doing it.

Did not God Sometimes withhold in mercy what we ask, We should be ruined at our own request.

I love prudence very little, if it is not moral.

If being a woman is a factor politically, it's usually not because of a conscious bias, but because women are a novelty.

The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government.