I like a twisted sense of humour. On 'A History of Violence,' David Cronenberg and I would be doing the grimmest scenes and laugh a lot.

There's no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there's no excuse for boredom, ever.

I have never been in a natural place and felt that it was a waste of time. I never have. And it's a relief. If I'm walking around a desert or whatever, every second is worthwhile.

It's hard not to get depressed when you pay attention to the world and how strangely and corrupt the people in it sometimes behave.

When I have a day off, I won't spend it at a Hollywood party. I'd rather be at home with paints and a blank canvas.

You should always do the things in life that are both interesting and make you afraid.

Be kind. It's worthwhile to make an effort to learn about other people and figure out what you might have in common with them.

You don't have to make something that people call art. Living is an artistic activity, there is an art to getting through the day.

I think that every person has many, many people inside of them. We change our personality depending on who we are talking to or what situation we are in.

I think every family is dysfunctional, and some manage to control it better than others.

My job as an artist, as I see it, is to understand and in some cases to take on various ways of thinking about people and the world that are different from my own, sometimes radically different.

Ownership breeds slavery: with every single thing that you acquire, comes a new worry of not losing that thing.

Friends have ways of speaking without words.

One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.

Just the night before, a puma’s howl had set a chill at my spine and, man, life didn’t get any richer than that.

Love will drive you insane, but never let it drive you stupid or blind.

The miracle centered gospel gives rise to a generation of people that believes that they don’t need to be good, better than anybody else but just want to pray and get favor.

To be honest, I think cell phones were invented by the devil.

Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.

Zen is discipline - the discipline of living life, the discipline of taking a breath, the discipline of not knowing and not trying to know.

To be tired it is only in your mind.