My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people's idea of obsessive.

You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.

People will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.

Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.

People go to the movies to see things they haven’t seen before. Call me a radical.

I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.

I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.

I think intelligence is totally subjective; it's like sexiness.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior and we sculpt light.

I like characters who don't change, who don't learn from their mistakes.

If I could be anyone, it would be Brad Pitt.

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,

Never trust money more than gold.

There will always be trouble so there will always be a time for heroes

Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.

Don't spend money that you don't have to impress people that you don't like

...China has announced that...it will hold the beach volleyball contest at the site of the 1989 massacre. Even Hitler didn't have the chutzpah to stage the 100-yard dash at Dachau.

Condensed milk is wonderful. I don't see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans.

Rather than being taught to accept ourselves, we were trained to make ourselves socially acceptable. And whenever we fail, we suffer inside.

Success doesn't stop when you get there

On her daughters: I have a 5 year old and I have a 1 year old.