You can't divorce yourself from your own life experiences.

I try and make non-fiction films that feel like fiction, so I'm always looking for the subtext and that's what really excites me.

Sometimes, you chase the moment and you can never catch it. Films take so long to make that you can never anticipate what the cultural landscape will be when the film enters the world.

When I grew up, we had no babysitters and nobody every observed us. People don't parent like that today. They're very hands-on; kids are constantly being supervised.

Oftentimes when people make movies about the '80s, they go back and look at '80s films, [but] those look nothing like the '80s. It's some watered-down version of reality.

The only people who really love the '80s are millennials. We had Reagan and Bush for our entire youth, the culture was terrible, the fashions were terrible, the movies were terrible.

You have Kurt [Cobain], and he's singing about your experiences. They're our collective experiences.

Everybody feels protective and possessive about Kurt [Cobain] , and I think that can be attributed to his unique gift, an ability to touch our lives, and make us feel like he's our friend.

I've never had access to another person's art and work or, particularly, someone who is as prolific and was able to externalize his interior world as deeply as Kurt [Cobain] could.

I never met Kurt Cobain, but I felt like I got to know him in a manner probably more intimate than anyone I've known outside of my family.

Kurt [Cobain ]was a feminist. A lot of the bashing against Courtney [Love] I think has to deal with gender bias and the media, and I think that he liked that she was taking the attention off of him.

Was this some new level of depravity? Had he developed a spinster fetish?

You can't control who your family is. I know about that. You can only pick good friends and maybe that's a better family.

What's a joy to the one is a nightmare to the other.

It takes more than going down to the video store and renting "Easy Rider" to be a rebel.

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.

If you look at the top ten most reliable cars, as reported by thousands of people in all kinds of independent testing, there's only one American car in the top ten. It's the Buick.

Just have a little bit of something that you want. Don't overdo it.

My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.

How will he who does not know how to govern himself know how to govern others?

Resist doing things that have no meaning for life.