I remember being a teenager and seeing Seymour Cassel across a crowded room and being incredibly star struck, and not having the courage to say, 'Hello.'

To be a creative person and be a professional, as an artist you have to be able to withstand pain, rejection, and for some, a lot of bad feelings, but you have to be able to look through those.

All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That’s what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.

To me, honesty and the difficulty of honest communication are at the heart of both my life and my movies. The difficulty of being yourself.

You are always factoring in the economy within the process of creating something, and making decisions that seem both fearless and full of fear.

I'm a version of the same person.

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.

The questions of economics, and how they infect, or rather how they affect intimacy. And that's probably the subject of all my films.

For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional.

I'm interested in what actors reveal about themselves through the structure of the character.

People who have nothing much in mind for next week speak instead about the next century or millennium.

My mother's a pretty warm, open person.

New media companies look remarkably like the old ones they aspire to replace: male, pale, and privileged.

When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship!

Everybody that knows me knows I have a temper.

My friend is one... who take me for what I am.

Christ is much more powerful to save, than Adam was to destroy.

Drama comes more naturally to me. It's the comedy you really have to delve into.

There prevails on a free labor market a tendency toward full employment.