The media in America has become so cowed and compromised.

To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'

Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by.

I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.

I like to act. I work for scale. I don't have an acting agent. I'm in the book.

My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it's a pro-democracy film. And if George W.Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that's his problem.

I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it's true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.

Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.

The hardest thing about movies is doing take 12, 13, and 14, and finding new ways to do the same lines. So the early takes are actually easier and I think there's more surprises in them.

The beginning of wisdom starts from persistently living up to your responsibilities in life, despite your circumstances.

Retro is a symptom of a generation that is too lazy to innovate.

And of a Sunday swarm the folkUnder the honeysuckle vine, Quaffing, the while they talk and smoke, The sun, the melody, the wine.

Every Christian has unique opportunities to engage the most pressing social issues of our day by praying, proclaiming the gospel, and participating with God in all that he is doing in the world.

I am the fool, and must be the sufferer, if it be not of God.

Look at all the stars. You look up and you think, 'God made all this and He remembered to make a little speck like me.' It's kind of flattering, really.

Socialism requires that government becomes your god.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

Nobody can really compare a relationship in which the victim is 15 years old to one where she's 6. While both criminal, they're very different circumstances.