Never be put off by anything because failure teaches you something.

Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?

Blade Runner was the godfather of all these fantastic movies that occur today. What's frustrating is that we're short of really great writing and great ideas. Blade Runner was full of them.

It doesn't matter how much faith you have or don't have [in aliens]. I just don't buy the idea that we're alone. There's got to be some form of life out there.

In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture.

I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.

But Gladiator is one of my favourite adventures because I really loved going into the world. I loved creating the world to the degree where you could almost smell it.

Once you crack the script, everything else follows.

Nowadays, everything's evolved into superheroes and it's boring. If I see one more superhero movie I'm going to shoot myself.

The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.

How can you look at the galaxy and not feel insignificant?

I thought it sounded a bit like Percy singing... maybe you've got to attack him while he's in the shower, Harry.

Take each day in your open palms and close your fists around it. This life is not done with you yet.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Every poem is an infant labored into birth and I am drenched with sweating effort, tired from the pain and hurt of being a man, in the poem I transform myself into a woman.

Every night before I turn out the lights to sleep I ask myself this question: Have I done everything that I can.... Have I done enough?

if i could be assured of your destruction, i would in the interest of the public, cheerfully accept my death.

We are but a day in this world, and in that day the fashion is changed a thousand times: all seek liberty, yet all deprive themselves of it.

I shall stick to my resolution of writing always what I think no matter whom it offends.

I am most interested in people. I try to capture their complexity and contradiction and beauty. It does not matter where they are from.

I think that the reality is, is that there's a shift in the mood in the USA that's very anti-Washington.