As a director, my job is to protect. I protect scripts, actors, cameramen, designers.

The only way you can learn about making films is by making them, by putting your stamp on the thing.

Audiences arent fools - their judgement really is important. And the true heroes of films are the investors. They take the risk, after all.

To be successful at anything, you need the right to fail, not just occasionally.

It never crossed my mind to make a film about Muhammad Ali or the Queen or any of them! They just come out of the blue.

There's the physical life and the voice, but at some point you abandon all of that, you know what the spirit of the person is and you let it descend and just get on with it.

I teach film directing, inasmuch as you can. Its not really possible to teach film direction, but I sit there as a sort of testimony of experience and know-how, I suppose.

We are all of us richer than we think we are.

Our aversion to lying is commonly a secret ambition to make what we say considerable, and have every word received with a religious respect.

I love stories about teachers. For some reason I can't get enough of those kind of stories. If I turn a movie on about a teacher, I love it. I love that idea of an adult influence on kids.

You have to know who you are to grow to your potential. But you have to grow in order to know who you are.

Life experiences become acting experiences, which in turn become life experiences.

A proper secrecy is the only mystery of able men; mystery is the only secrecy of weak and cunning ones.

No matter how long what I'm doing here lasts, I want to be a songwriter for the rest of my life. I love it and it's my escape.

I cry a lot. My emotions are very close to my surface. I don't want to hold anything in so it festers and turns into pus - a pustule of emotion that explodes into a festering cesspool of depression.

Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.

For me it comes down to one thing: I'm trying to follow my own nature.