Cinema is an art form that is designed to go across borders. And as a filmmaker, the only way I can direct a movie is when I feel close to my culture.

Sometimes you have compulsions that you can't control coming from the subconscious they are the dictator inside ourselves.

I think a good director is a good listener.

You cannot make promises because you never know what your next project will be.

'Arrival' talks very little about language and how to precisely dissect a foreign language. It's more a film on intuition and communication by intuition, the language of intuition.

I'm a very slow screenwriter. It takes time for me to write a screenplay. Also, I feel it's not my strength.

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.

'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' Big, big, big smash for me. My birth of the love of cinema was born with 'Close Encounters' and '2001.' Those sci-fi movies I saw when I was a little kid.

Making poetry with a camera - that's the essence of what I do.

If you don't deal with your shadows, you are condemned to repeat the same mistake over and over, as a human being or as a society.

Memories tell me who I was, not who I’ll become. They don’t fix the present any more than they fix the past.

Everybody has multiple personalities—at least three. We’re one person at work, another person in private, and a third person when we appear in polite society.

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

Whether science-and indeed civilization in general-can long survive depends upon psychology, that is to say, it depends upon what human beings desire.

A photographer who wants to see, a photographer who wants to make fine images, must recognize the value in the familiar.

Internalized sexism that makes us feel like we can't show ourselves not being perfect.

Preppy clothes are built to last, since they certainly won't go out of style.

You can get an Egg McMuffin all day; you just can't get the hamburger all day.

Steve Wozniak admittedly would never like say the things he said to Steve Jobs [in the movie] in the context that he said them.

Faith is not belief, it is the grasp on the Ultimate, an illumination.