That's why my attitude, even on my larger-scale movies, is to make them cheap. The less these things cost, the better for everybody.

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.

I don’t see the me that you see. I wish for just a lit­tle bit I could climb into you and then you could climb into me and then we could tell each other what we saw there.

Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.

The universe has much bigger plans for you than you ever dreamed of for yourself.

If you don't feel you're the best, then you shouldn't be doing your job. No one else cares if you don't care about yourself.

Art is nothing but the expression of our dream; the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things, our dream-life, the true life that scorns questions and does not see them.

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.

People who look for easy money invariable pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this earth.

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.

Many things prevent knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life

I have lost a brother and a best friend. The world has lost one of the greatest actors of all time.