('Eraserhead') may seem like a dark film, but my father and I watch it, and all we do is laugh. It was Disneyland everyday on the set. That's when I fell in love with film.

I have gone insane. I won't be talking with you for a while.

Try to be as good a listener as you are a speaker. Don't just put the emphasis on saying things. Listen.

The first time I saw 'Sunset Boulevard' I was probably eight or nine years old, and it really struck me how it's so simply put and elegant, yet there's so much going on.

I really believe that if you're going to bring a child into the world, it's your job to parent that world. Especially if it's just you; you don't pawn her off on somebody.

I may not be wealthy; I'm living from pay check to pay check, but I get to make movies, which is what I love to do.

When you love something, it never goes away.

For me, I was given a great gift by my father and my mother in that I was never told any idea was bad. I was told I could explore any thought as long as I wasn't hurting someone else.

Some people are just not going to like me and they're not going to like my work. But that doesn't mean I'm a bad person.

My father is so jolly, and I live a really happy life. I think that's why all my interest in the darker things in films comes up: because I'm curious about things I don't live in.

Pressure is an emotional paralysis. It's hard enough to do the dishes when you're feeling pressured, let alone make a movie.

My patience has dreadful chilblains from standing so long on a monument.

A lawyer's empathy for her client deepens when she realizes that she has only seen the last couple of phases of his decline. How hard it must his initial adjustment have been to his loss of freedom?

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.

Current ethos in Silicon Valley is that if you build a website that people keep coming back to and is changing the lives of millions, you can eventually make money.

No men are oftener wrong than those that can least bear to be so.

You know what would help the instruction form? Verbs! Verbs would be nice! Because they help you get to the end of a thought!

The right of revolution, which tyrants, in mockery, accord to mankind, is no legal right under a government; it is only a natural right to overturn a government.

While wounds can be inflicted easily upon those we love, it's often much more difficult to heal them.

As far as the filmmaking process is concerned, stars are essentially worthless - and absolutely essential.

Literature is a comprehensive essence of the intellectual life of a nation.