As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.

I'm a control freak. Totally.

A dream that you don't fight for can haunt you for the rest of your life.

Ripe bananas are the mark of a good produce section. A good produce section is the mark of a superior grocery store. A superior grocery store is the mark of a good man.

Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk - and collect it.

The thing is, I'm a very practical filmmaker.

Sometimes we all make relationships more complicated than they necessarily have to be.

I write in the mornings. During my down time.

People wear shorts to the Broadway theater. There should be a law against that.

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.

I have consciously not taken the role of a gangster, which has been offered to me far too many times.

God wants us to be significant

Better to stay home than travel in a hurry.

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.

[The judiciary is] the least dangerous branch of our government.

Sometimes I want to joke but my English isn't perfect. Sometimes people are wondering what I'm talking about.

We are always saying to ourself.. we have to innovate. We got to come up with that breakthrough... we're only paid for breakthroughs.

Find your soul and you'll live. Lose your soul and you'll die.

I used to be the kind of person who needed to have a lot of people around. That's where I found my serenity.

I loved Alex so much that it was easier to let him hurt me than to watch him hurt himself.

Everyone of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.