Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.

I used to be a die-hard defender of physical film, which I still am. I love shooting on physical film and I think it's great.

Evil is a really tough concept for me. The idea of a villain that is bad for bad's sake seems kind of absurd.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.

My films do very well on home video.

Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

Action to me is something very fun to shoot.

I love films like Deliverance where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.

Motivational and moral books can change your present and future. Only The Bible can change your past.

You are a lawmaker in your own right.

You are the cause of your suffering. That means that you alone have the power to change it.

We know enough to know that all of this is not quite right. And we know enough to know that settling for what’s not quite right is quite wrong.

Godliness is the root of cleanliness.

The man who suspects his own tediousness has yet to be born.

Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment.

You don't even really need a place. But you feel like you're doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.

If you are a successful actor, which is what I am, then you tend to get labelled very quickly and easily.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.