So yes, I hope to act in other people's movies, big and small, because that's how I make my living, really.

As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.

I'm a control freak. Totally.

A dream that you don't fight for can haunt you for the rest of your life.

Ripe bananas are the mark of a good produce section. A good produce section is the mark of a superior grocery store. A superior grocery store is the mark of a good man.

Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk - and collect it.

The thing is, I'm a very practical filmmaker.

Sometimes we all make relationships more complicated than they necessarily have to be.

I write in the mornings. During my down time.

People wear shorts to the Broadway theater. There should be a law against that.

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.

Every struggle is like mud - there are always some lotus seeds waiting to sprout.

Naughty John, Naughty John, does his work with his apron on. Cuts your throat and takes your bones, sells 'em off for a coupla stones.

The art of our necessities is strangeThat can make vile things precious.

Football teaches you hard work. It takes a lot of unspectacular preparation to have spectacular results in both business and football.

That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

When it's impossible, it's better to stoop to compromise, without resisting and without complaining. People who complain are selfish.

If - and it can be in a movie or in a department store - I hear someone arguing with their child, I break down and cry. Because it reflects how I was treated when I was little.

It remains to be seen, for example whether China can continue to develop as a market economy while still retaining an authoritarian communist political system.

In perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism.

I'm as restless as a willow in a windstorm.