Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.

I never knew what I wanted, except that it was something I hadn't seen before.

[The Player is] not a truthful indictment of Hollywood. It's much uglier than I portrayed it, but nobody would've been interested if I'd shown just how sadistic, cruel and self-orientated it is.

Your own ego is the only trap that I think you can fall into.

I love fishing. You put that line in the water and you don't know what's on the other end. Your imagination is under there.

Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.

I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing - I mean, I think it's blueprinting.

If you have a child who is seven feet tall, you don't cut off his head or his legs. You buy him a bigger bed and hope he plays basketball.

All of my films deal with the same thing: striving, socially and culturally, to stay alive.

What is an ending? There's no such thing. Death is the only ending.

I have never made a movie that's attracted a 14-year-old boy.

The outfit, tight in places, and loose in some, says as much in the buttons as it does in cuffs.

He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.

Until you prevail with God, you cannot prevail with men; your victory has to be spiritual first, before it is physical.

I can't control what happens to me, but I can control how I respond to it.

What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace - business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering

The way you can recognize to what you are committed to is by your actual results. What you have gotten in life is a direct result (good or bad) to what you have been committed to.

Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.

We did receive some questions about the film's [Aquarius] sexuality in Cannes, but they came from the press rather than audiences.

Give your main clause a little space. Prose is not like boxing; the skilled writer deliberately telegraphs his punch, knowing that the reader wants to take the message directly on the chin.