There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.

I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That’s the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.

Any good movie is filled with secrets.

There's nothing in the American dream about character. It's a serious flaw.

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.

The unconscious is our best collaborator.

Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.

I was just trying to make a nice little movie... It wasn't until I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.

I love the editing process of making movies. I just wish that life had one.

I have never understood people dividing things into dramas and comedies.

I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition.

Make your pain productive and you can transform tragedy into triumph.

The people he met, the places he passed, were all steps in his journey, and he kept a place inside his heart for each of them.

And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms.

The farther the experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize.

I do believe that [climate change] is real.

Character is what you have when nobody is looking.

There’s always tomorrow, until there’s not.

L.A.'s a better place to live than it is to visit.

In Downing Street they called me 'Boss'. Civil servants would always call me 'Prime Minister'.