Never had a cup of coffee in my life. Dr Pepper is my caffeine delivery system of choice.

I think I'm good at amplifying an actor's strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.

To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.

If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

What are the stories you want people to tell about you?

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

Only the painter who knows his business can create the impression that a picture was done in one stroke.

Weapons are kept from women, but such a naming suggests that perhaps men fear our talents in war as well as our desire for peace.

Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the moon, and that's a very dubious and disappointing honor. It's been far too long.

What the federal government does basically is borrow money from people and mail it to people.

Politeness requires this thing; decorum that; ceremony has its forms, and fashion its laws, and these must always follow, never the promptings of our own nature.

A young critic is like a boy with a gun; he fires at every living thing he sees. He thinks only of his own skill, not of the pain he is giving.

Many times we are tempted to defer to the documents we create, rather than the direct experiences we have.

That's what librarians do. They open up the world. Because knowledge is useless if you don’t know how to find it, if you don’t even know where to begin to look.

Sovereignty must be redefined if states are to cope with globalisation.

You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.