When I was really young I didn't know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.

To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'

Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by.

I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.

I like to act. I work for scale. I don't have an acting agent. I'm in the book.

My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it's a pro-democracy film. And if George W.Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that's his problem.

I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it's true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.

Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.

The hardest thing about movies is doing take 12, 13, and 14, and finding new ways to do the same lines. So the early takes are actually easier and I think there's more surprises in them.

God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.

Let an eagle's stance in life be your stance too: Noble and powerful!

It wasn't what you said", he told her."It was how I felt when you said it".

What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?

I never like to be the same, whether it be comedy or drama, funny or serious.

The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

I would love to embody the attitude of Iggy Pop or Keith Richards: a ballsy mentality. Stylistically, I love Vivienne Westwood - those capes! I'm obsessed.

The still small voice within you must always be the final arbiter when there is a conflict of duty.

To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

My older sister is a working mom. She's busy. She chooses to spend money on her children. But she should be able to afford a good shoe for herself.