I met Steve McQueen once. Well, met isn't really the right word.

Although there was a screenplay, the actors never knew what questions I was going to ask them, and all of my character's voice-over narration and scenes were added after the fact.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

New York means so much to people. If you're inclined to leave the nest, New York is where most people think they have to go, and it's been that way since the first skyscraper.

My hunger and desperation, being an actor, an out of work actor - my memory of that is as fresh as an open wound.

I'm in five guilds; that's a lot of dues to pay. So I have to keep on working.

I'm being told it saves money to shoot in Toronto, because of tax benefits, the crews are cheaper, but what I save in the bottom line, I lose in a million other ways.

As a director, I've been able to combine with what I've learned as an actor and as a producer: it melds quite nicely into what I feel like I should have been doing all along.

I've always been schizophrenic; I've never been interested in limiting myself.

On every movie I’ve done as a director, I look at the producers and having done it, I don’t envy them, at all.

To see a comedy in an environment where you're surrounded by other people that are laughing is great. That's probably more satisfying than just watching it by yourself.

I’d find someone else. No distractions. Men get in the way of ambition. Plus, they laugh at you when you fail

You have gone into the Temple...and found Him, as always, there.

We should not be entertained by the sins for which Christ died.

To be a great actor you just need to comprehend, so that's why I became a writer.

There's a perceived inverse relation between looks and talent. Look at Charlize Theron - she made herself ugly for 'Monster' and suddenly everyone said 'she's a genius.' It shouldn't be like that.

I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.

Art is the ability to separate the significant from the insignificant.

We must be on our guard against giving interpretations which are hazardous or opposed to science, and so exposing the word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers.

Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.

The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance