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

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.

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.

He was massive, a veritable Arnold Schwarzenegger of a cat, with a wide, handsome face and a proud, lionish expression.

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.

I'm not a big fan of 'Jersey Shore' and those kinds of shows where people are really playing up to the cameras.

I'm happy to always be included in the list of women. I'd like to be in the sections about female leaders and male leaders. Why not?

Preventing war is much better than protesting against the war. Protesting the war is too late.

Simplicity is freedom.

That is the charm of the map. It represents the other side of the horizon where everything is possible.

The rich are like beasts of burden, carrying treasure all day, and at the night of death unladen; they carry to their grave only the bruises and marks of their toil.

When pain and suffering come upon us, we finally see not only that we are not in control of our lives but that we never were.

We always want the best man to win an election. Unfortunately, he never runs.