For my 10th birthday, what I wanted was Beatle boots and a Beatle wig. My parents couldn't find Beatle boots, but down at the dime store, Woolworths or someplace, they found a Beatle wig!

One of the great things about being a director as a life choice is that it can never be mastered. Every story is its own kind of expedition, with its own set of challenges.

Confidence is preparation in action.

If I had to choose between a great acting job and a good directing job, I'd choose the directing job.

Humor is unavoidable. It might not feel funny in the moment, but more often than not there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Death can be experienced once, winning maybe more, but losing can happen all the time.

I've just looked for ideas and great characters that I relate to and that I think I can offer something to the audience, and I no longer look at them as experiments or genre exercises at all.

I think the most important thing really was that you could take very personal ideas and present them to an audience in entertaining ways.

There's a very real argument that the minute we are capable of going to a planet, whether it's Mars or another one, and inhabiting it, that we really should.

I'm not a caterer. I just have to stay with my creative convictions. At some point, you have to just get past the special-interest groups and do what you're there to do, which is make a movie.

You're always a little surprised when something really takes off.

Growing up, I knew where the world ended. I could see it, at the horizon, where the sky touched the corn. My life was bounded and known. I *knew* the edges of the world. And then I went to college.

Prayer is the lisping of the believing infant, the shout of the fighting believer, the requiem of the dying saint falling asleep in Jesus.

Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe.

Count your blessings, but not out-loud, at the top of your lungs.

I never understood people who don't have bookshelves.

...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.

The formula for achieving middle-class success is simple: Finish high school; don't have a child before the age of 20; and get married before having the child.

When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists - nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven.

The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible.

I grew up reading comic books. Super hero comic books, Archie comic books, horror comic books, you name it.