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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why waste your strength envying and hating instead of loving?

Let your love be the light of your life. Now enlighten the whole world with the brightness of that light.

Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: “What-Would-Jesus-Buy”—well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.

Experience should have taught ye by now that denying me what I want only makes me more relentless.

It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.

I think any role you need to play not so much transforms but I like to think of it as understanding the psychology of another character.

My mother died when I was five, and all I did was sit and cry. I cried and cried and cried all day, until the neighbors went away.

Nobody was talking about healthcare until 'Sicko' came out.

Women were doing quite well in this country before feminism came along.

Successful people follow successful patterns.