Anytime you cast a movie and you need someone famous in the lead part, you're a prisoner of whoever happens to be famous in the six-month window in which you're trying to get a film financed.

What is filmmaking but groping in the dark?

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.

I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.

I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.

There is an audience out there for literate films - slower, more observant, more human films, and they deserve to be made.

You just never know when you're living in a golden age.

The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.

A pitfall of making a comedy with a studio-and it's also an American cultural thing-is that I get tired of being encouraged to go always for laughs.

I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.

If you have your movies so that everyone understands everything, I think that's probably not a very good movie.

Without the ability to be present we are missing much of what the adventure has to offer.

Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct.

For the writer, madness should seep slowly out of them from the world they endure each day.

Everybody is trying to be so trendy. I think not being trendy should be the next trend.

Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves.

Fox News has changed its slogan from 'Fair and Balanced' to 'See, I told you so!'

There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.

Mom's always telling me to smile and hoping I'll turn into a smiley person, which, to be honest, is kind of annoying.

And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and dead airframe come to life at the touch of a human hand, and join their life with the pilot's own.

I worry about putting food on the table, paying for my kids needs, their college fees in years to come. It's about earning enough to have a living to be able to look after your children.