I think beauty is the splendor of truth, so if the people I portray think they're beautiful, they're beautiful. I don't make them that way.

In Bangladesh a prostitute normally wouldn't even undress for a man. He pays, she pulls up her sari, and he's done in 20 seconds.

Sometimes the presence of a camera is like opening a door.

If you connect with someone just once, that's something. But if you can connect twice, that's something else.

I've made many documentaries, but prostitution was the hardest in terms of gaining the trust of the people being filmed.

As a filmmaker I cannot make anything beautiful. I'm Platonic in that sense.

The most important thing is to find people that you enjoy - friends that you enjoy playing music with.

Sometimes the presence of a camera is like opening a door, because many people want what Andy Warhol called "15 minutes of fame." But prostitutes don't want that.

On one hand, they [prostitutes] don't struggle because it's simply their life. In Mexico and elsewhere, once they get out of these places [brothels] they have a pretty square life.

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

To have something does not mean to understand it.

Have you ever walked late at night through a forest when you are first in love?

Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.

I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour.

None of us ever know all the possible courses our lives could have and maybe should have taken. It's probably just as well. Some secrets are meant to stay secret forever. Just ask Pandora.

I think we hear a lot of talk about college, and we don't hear about early education.

Of all the songs that I've written since I was 15 or 16, every song is different every song is special, it happens in a different way and I like that.

Without work men are utterly undone

Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning.