When you're in the editing process, you try different things and you get creative ideas.

You can't really just think, "Oh, I want to make something that is going to appeal to every single person in the world." You have to just try to make a movie that comes from your heart.

People love to talk, so let them have fun talking.

As a director, you've got to have quite a few projects going because you never know which one will actually come together with the financing and get the green light.

If a scene doesn't work on three levels - it's not advancing the story, the characters, and telling me something new - then put it in the trash.

I thought, "If I can make you feel what it's like for that first super-passionate love, other people might like that too," and, of course, they did.

Since I was a little kid, I did like fairy tale. I did dress up like Little Red Riding Hood. My mom had to make me a cape.

I thought it would be quite a challenge to direct a mystery thriller. I hadn't really done something like that.

When I was just five years old, I loved the scary layer and the symbolical power of the red cloak. I made my mom make me that red cloak, and I had to wear it on Halloween, two years in a row.

When I talk to film students, I always say, "Buy the DVDs and listen to the commentaries, look at the making of, look at the behind-the-scenes," because that's such a great learning tool.

Usually, we have some of those nostalgic moments like, "Oh my god, I can't believe we survived that day," because filmmaking is such a wild roller coaster ride.

...the facts of economic life cannot be comprehensively described in terms of statistics.

To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.

My best ideas almost always come from winding up in unexpected places and stumbling across things I never could have imagined in advance.

Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.

Nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents.

I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man I have ever met.

When you find your soulmate, you could sleep under their armpits.

Our plans never turn out as tasty as reality.

Become a "learning organization". Shuck your arrogance - "if it isn't our idea, it can't be that good" - and become a determined copycat/ adapter/ enhancer.

A lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there.