The key is, if youre not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.

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.

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.

The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.

Truth cannot be changed. When all the flowers of the world are dead, there will still be a true thing that is a flower.

I don't think anyone in their right mind takes me serious.

Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.

I'm far more dangerous now, because I don't care at all.

No matter what size I am I love performing no matter how big or little I am! I feel good.

There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success.

General notions are generally wrong.

Failure either ruins you, or turns you into the man you can become.