If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it's going to get made. You saw it almost the next day.

To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'

Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by.

I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.

I like to act. I work for scale. I don't have an acting agent. I'm in the book.

My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it's a pro-democracy film. And if George W.Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that's his problem.

I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it's true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.

Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.

The hardest thing about movies is doing take 12, 13, and 14, and finding new ways to do the same lines. So the early takes are actually easier and I think there's more surprises in them.

To make this world joyful, let your heart overflow with joy.

Humor can be one of our best survival tools.

When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman.

When one theory is simpler than its competitor, this fact is relevant to saying what the world is like.

True charity occurs only when there are no notions of giving, giver, or gift.

If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix ... Take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.

Women have to be active listeners and interrupters - but when you interrupt, you have to know what you are talking about.

If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know.

I learned quickly that if the student’s perception is that you’re not listening to them, and not understanding them, they discredit you.