The human race is fundamentally insane. If you put two of us into a room together we're soon gonna start figuring out good reasons to kill one another.

A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.

The Exorcist' is amazing because it recognizes that silences can be as powerful as sound effects.

If you're going to succeed, you've got to be like one of those punch-drunk fighters in the old Warner Bros. boxing pictures: too stupid to fall down, you just keep slugging and stay on your feet.

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

I think a story should take as long to tell as it is appropriate to that particular story.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film.

Boy, I'd hate to shoot on tape or disc or whatever the hell they're talking about. I love film.

The amazing thing about any movie is not whether it's good, but that it got made at all.

I just tell you what a pleasure it is to get back to the kind of filmmaking I used to be allowed to do.

I pray Father that the work of my hands would be a blessing to all who I come into contact with.

How has he moved so quickly from childlike naïvité to existential panic?

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

You change your life by changing your heart.

It is not the mere study of the Law, but to become eminent in the profession of it, which is to yield honor and profit.

I don't play golf. Mark Twain is golf to me.

Sometimes a man does what he'd most like to avoid.

Great things astonish us, and small dishearten us. Custom makes both familiar.

There's a difference between failures and things that are bad.

A few years back, this guy [Barack Obama] would be serving us coffee.