What is a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.

Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.

I never knew what I wanted, except that it was something I hadn't seen before.

[The Player is] not a truthful indictment of Hollywood. It's much uglier than I portrayed it, but nobody would've been interested if I'd shown just how sadistic, cruel and self-orientated it is.

Your own ego is the only trap that I think you can fall into.

I love fishing. You put that line in the water and you don't know what's on the other end. Your imagination is under there.

Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.

I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing - I mean, I think it's blueprinting.

If you have a child who is seven feet tall, you don't cut off his head or his legs. You buy him a bigger bed and hope he plays basketball.

All of my films deal with the same thing: striving, socially and culturally, to stay alive.

What is an ending? There's no such thing. Death is the only ending.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

The universe is made of stories, not atoms!

Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Half effort does not produce half results. It produces no results. Work continuous work and hard work is the only way to accomplish results that last.

Politics, after all, is largely about power. And power goes to the core of our issues of control and narcissism and need to be right and tendency to divide the human race into 'us' vs. 'them.'

Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*.

Every year, dads will dress up as Santa and try to surprise their kids by coming down the chimney, and every year, a dad gets stuck and dies.

I want to be as famous as midnight. As powerful as a gun. As loved as a pizza.

Power is being told you're not loved and not being destroyed by it.

Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance.

This is the risk: the primary word can only be spoken with the whole being. He who gives himself to it may withhold nothing of himself.