When you're directing, I feel like I'm playing all the parts, without the make-up. I really get into the heads of the characters.

Although there was a screenplay, the actors never knew what questions I was going to ask them, and all of my character's voice-over narration and scenes were added after the fact.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

New York means so much to people. If you're inclined to leave the nest, New York is where most people think they have to go, and it's been that way since the first skyscraper.

My hunger and desperation, being an actor, an out of work actor - my memory of that is as fresh as an open wound.

I'm in five guilds; that's a lot of dues to pay. So I have to keep on working.

I'm being told it saves money to shoot in Toronto, because of tax benefits, the crews are cheaper, but what I save in the bottom line, I lose in a million other ways.

As a director, I've been able to combine with what I've learned as an actor and as a producer: it melds quite nicely into what I feel like I should have been doing all along.

I've always been schizophrenic; I've never been interested in limiting myself.

On every movie I’ve done as a director, I look at the producers and having done it, I don’t envy them, at all.

I met Steve McQueen once. Well, met isn't really the right word.

May the goodness of God's face forever shine on our path.

There was for everything a possibility, an invisible pattern that could be made manifest given work and the right materials.

Few people are spoken of in the way they would choose

If you're going to perform inception, you need imagination. You need the simplest version of the idea-the one that will grow naturally in the subject's mind. Subtle art.

The greatest glory never comes from falling, but from rising each time you fall.

You don't know what to say to me because the kingdom is within...flesh and blood's dream...so you fly now, pay later, all of us...I mean actually it's PAY NOW, FLY LATER

I think that most great artists who are extremely known, as I am, would intimidate a lot of people. I don't want to do that to people, but I know I do.

I'm not there to impose my religious beliefs on anybody, or say 'this is the only way you should think'. It's up to you to decide, and God is a God of free will.

My oldest brother was a big influence on the films I watched as a kid.

I don't think one parent can raise a child. I don't think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.