One of the things that I do like about filmmaking is that you find out how to solve new problems.

The secret of the creative life is to feel at ease with your own embarrassment.

Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

Let's just shoot in black and white. Don't explain why. Have no reason for it. Just do it because it's interesting.

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.

Once you have a situation that is fresh, then you sort of believe in it and it becomes normal. So you do end up with protagonists that haven't been in other movies before.

Don't ever let the viewer settle in and get ahead of you.

Ultimately, it's an illusion that you can understand yourself.

Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors.

I teach a course in screenwriting at Columbia, but I've never taken a course and I've never read a book about it!

I want to be happy; why do I do things that make me unhappy?

Live on no complex dreams... When the meaning of what you want to do isn't clear, it means there is absolutely no meaning! Simplicity with curiosity is the lap on which success rests!

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

If you don't love yourself, you cannot love others. You will not be able to love others. If you have no compassion for yourself then you are not able of developing compassion for others.

I played bass for a year, but I wasn't getting better at it, so I decided to stop so I could see my friends.

To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.

Regardless of how much is left in the tank, you gotta fight back!

I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm.

Form and Substance are opposite ends of the same coin.

The innovation point is the pivotal moment when talented and motivated people seek the opportunity to act on their ideas and dreams.