A lot of the commercials that I was doing were very slice-of-life, emotional, documentary-style, not big and cinematic and ultimately like the kind of movie I wanted to make.

I spent a long time trying to make it in the commercial world hoping that commercials would then lead to movies. That was a less-travelled path at the time, although it's very well-travelled now.

I grew up loving Ridley Scott and Tony Scott and Michael Bay and Adrian Lyne.

I allow myself to get firmly sucked in. I love that! I come from that.

Kind deed is a seed of love.

I look at the cake in my mother's arms and think: here stands the only person in the whole world who'd go to such trouble for fractious, ungrateful me.

You said your mom is the goddess of balance, " I reminded him. "The minor gods deserve better, Ethan, but total destruction isn't balance. Kronos doesn't build. He only destroys.

Your 'let's remain calm and stay put' speech would be a lot more convincing if you weren't giving it in front of a pile of burning skeletons.

I reflect back 35 years ago, and look how far we have come in America with our environmental policy to improve the conditions of our air and water, and we have had some real successes.

I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into [writing] when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.

I was honestly never a huge school person.

You can have the best intentions in the world but if you do nothing, you are nothing.

Man is not a ship in harbour; Earth is not a ship in harbour; even Universe is not a ship in harbour! No safe harbour for anything exists!

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.