When it comes to action, I'd say Mel Gibson and Will [Smith] were great.

Nobody makes movies bad on purpose.

I'm a filmmaker, not a scientist.

I try to put in every one of my movies some sort of message. I don't want to overdo it, because I don't want people to get annoyed by it, but it's good to have a message.

Do not fear. Some things will never change.

I'm only a stupid filmmaker.

When you find something where you can give people a message and still make it an exciting movie, you get very, very excited about something. You probably even work harder than you normally do.

I think every good, entertaining movie should have a message. I really believe that, because if you do it without it, the film feels a little bit soulless.

It's like everybody is obsessed with Hollywood movies worldwide. And even though everybody hates the Americans, they're still watching American movies.

A lot of stuff in Wikipedia is not true, and that goes for a lot of people. I sometimes think, "How can that happen?" But Wikipedia is maintained by people, and everybody can add stuff to it.

Everybody knows that the industrialized nations are the worst offenders.

Sooner or later everything that exists ceases to exist, and then something comes along to take its place, but not always something better.

Only by perfect virtue can the perfect path, in all its courses, be made a fact.

By nature, you're aggressive, if you're a fighter, so you deal with things in an aggressive way.

An anarchist does not want to rule others and does not want others to rule him. Nothing is so despicable as half-an-anarchist.

I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.

Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.

If you want nothing, do what you want. If you want everything, develop discipline

Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.

The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

‎"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.