With every project I start out on, there's no footage. It's always a big slog to find the footage.

No one likes documentaries.

As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, "I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view."

Jobs' incredible skill was as a storyteller, a salesman. He could captivate our imaginations and reel us in. He was more P.T. Barnum than Thomas Edison.

Fundamental problem in American democracy is that we are allowing congressmen and senators to be bought and sold like sneakers.

I come from a filmmaking tradition and a storytelling background. So somehow I've emerged like a mutant who can straddle both worlds.

It's easy to get armchair analysts to talk, but to get people on the inside to talk is very, very hard.

The stuff about film being a collaborative medium is no joke.

I think many articles in the New Yorker have a strong point of view, but they are so rigorously fact-checked. I wouldn't call them objective, but they feel fair.

As the power of governments wanes, corporations become ever more powerful. Sometimes they do things that aren't so good. We should pay attention.

You can't expect the institution to learn, if it doesn't accept any sense of justice.

In the silence of night, great minds either unite or die

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

Art has to change things, and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job.

I was delighted to become a popular-culture reference point. I'm still delighted about it actually, and I still find it to be weird.

It's a losing proposition, but one you can't refuse. It's the politics of contraband, it's the smuggler's blues.

I finally did work out a very good relationship with my father, but it was rough growing up. We had a lot of conflict, and I think it surfaced in many of my works.

i'm sure i'm worth a lot more dead than alive

I mope around less. It is horrible. I miss it.

Food choices affect health outcomes, and consumers need to have the latest, most up-to-date scientific information in making their food choices.

It’s an incredibly exciting thing, this one, meaningless life of yours.