If I had to choose between a great acting job and a good directing job, I'd choose the directing job.

One of the great things about being a director as a life choice is that it can never be mastered. Every story is its own kind of expedition, with its own set of challenges.

Confidence is preparation in action.

Humor is unavoidable. It might not feel funny in the moment, but more often than not there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Death can be experienced once, winning maybe more, but losing can happen all the time.

I've just looked for ideas and great characters that I relate to and that I think I can offer something to the audience, and I no longer look at them as experiments or genre exercises at all.

I think the most important thing really was that you could take very personal ideas and present them to an audience in entertaining ways.

There's a very real argument that the minute we are capable of going to a planet, whether it's Mars or another one, and inhabiting it, that we really should.

I'm not a caterer. I just have to stay with my creative convictions. At some point, you have to just get past the special-interest groups and do what you're there to do, which is make a movie.

You're always a little surprised when something really takes off.

The sooner we become a multi-planet species, the safer the species is, and the stronger the guarantee that we're going to continue to evolve.

Woven words are little conviction when I present myself as a man of fiction.

Appear On Your Fear, It Will Disappear

If you can smile when things go wrong, you have someone in mind to blame.

My death has not yet quite arrived, but it is near and inevitable as night follows day.

Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.

Before I got glasses, I thought Monet was the world's only realist landscape painter.

I'm known for being a good listener. Most people need a lot of love and encouragement and I'm more than willing to give a person all the encouragement and time they need.

In war, discipline can do more than fury.

Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.

Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.