Truth and facts have to trump partisanship. There has to be something that's true regardless of what your angle is on it.

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.

pse.The Scars come before the Stars.

Dinner a time when . . . one should eat wisely but not too well and talk well but not too wisely.

Of Dickens' style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.

My father was a classical pianist, and my mother was a singer of just about everything.

To have insurance and have a diagnosis and to have doctors, I just felt it would be immoral on some level to complain.

During the Atlantean Cycle, the earth's aura, the invisible astral energy field that surrounds and protects our planet and through which all psychic perception flows, was very pure.

Psychic development makes you strong. It develops a common sense attitude in which you don't expose yourself to forces, people and situations that would drain you.

I really like going to see movies. I know that's super boring but it's true!

If there were no valleys of sadness and death, we could never really appreciate the sunshine of happiness on the mountain top.

For me, it [Crimea] is not borders and state territories that matter, but people's fortunes.