I think many articles in the New Yorker have a strong point of view, but they are so rigorously fact-checked. I wouldn't call them objective, but they feel fair.

With every project I start out on, there's no footage. It's always a big slog to find the footage.

No one likes documentaries.

As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, "I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view."

Jobs' incredible skill was as a storyteller, a salesman. He could captivate our imaginations and reel us in. He was more P.T. Barnum than Thomas Edison.

Fundamental problem in American democracy is that we are allowing congressmen and senators to be bought and sold like sneakers.

I come from a filmmaking tradition and a storytelling background. So somehow I've emerged like a mutant who can straddle both worlds.

It's easy to get armchair analysts to talk, but to get people on the inside to talk is very, very hard.

The stuff about film being a collaborative medium is no joke.

As the power of governments wanes, corporations become ever more powerful. Sometimes they do things that aren't so good. We should pay attention.

You can't expect the institution to learn, if it doesn't accept any sense of justice.

The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people.

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.

I guess ignorance is bliss - when I do interviews people always say, "Aren't you upset that people make fun of you?" and I'm like, "Are they making fun of me?" I guess I just don't get it.

A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.

Suddenly this camera, this thing, allowed me to move around the world in a certain kind of way, with a certain kind of purpose. (On receiving a camera for her twenty-first birthday)

A black man singing about a blond girl was potential trouble.

Love, why have you sought the horde of spearsmen, why the tent Achilles pitched beside the river-ford?

Given the nature of market, the chance of a crash is always greater than the chance of an overnight runaway euphoria.

My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

I realized that what was most important to me was following my own path, and not the one laid down for me by others.