What you do, is you gradually become more and more experienced, and more and more realistic about dramatic tolerance, i.e. about how long the play should be.

Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?

Blade Runner was the godfather of all these fantastic movies that occur today. What's frustrating is that we're short of really great writing and great ideas. Blade Runner was full of them.

It doesn't matter how much faith you have or don't have [in aliens]. I just don't buy the idea that we're alone. There's got to be some form of life out there.

In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture.

I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.

But Gladiator is one of my favourite adventures because I really loved going into the world. I loved creating the world to the degree where you could almost smell it.

Once you crack the script, everything else follows.

Never be put off by anything because failure teaches you something.

Nowadays, everything's evolved into superheroes and it's boring. If I see one more superhero movie I'm going to shoot myself.

The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.

Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?

Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance. It is the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance.

Short as life is, some find it long enough to outlive their characters, their constitutions and their estates.

When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.

I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.

Don't let anyone tell you that America's best days are behind her - that the American spirit has been vanquished. We've seen it triumph too often in our lives to stop believing in it now.

I was really sporty and loved singing. I started off doing musical theater. I left university to go to drama school. So I was a bit of a black sheep.

After my mother died, I lived with relatives. Reading was a means of escaping into other worlds, as photography, much later, was to become.

You have to take a plan that might work and make it work