Music films are great, but they can never compete with a live performance. Live music is what it is. It's the whole point. You experience it in the moment.

When you're working on a script, every word that's on the page, somebody has to read it. Make every word count in your stories.

Everything I've made - it doesn't mean they've all been good - but everything I've made so far, big or little, fiction or documentary, has been something that I've been really enthusiastic about.

I'm guided by my enthusiasm.

I also feel that the only thing more gratifying than working with someone who you've worked well with is working with someone new and coming up with something great.

If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something.

I like finding a great shot and then just staying with it for a long time, not trying to pump things up with some kind of artificial energy by cutting.

It's a funny thing with documentary films - you want them to feel as entertaining and as gripping as a fictional film. With a fictional film you want it to feel as realistic as a documentary film.

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing.

I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do.

The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

No one ever addresses the possibility that a writer might not like her book.

We can all be conned but at what point do we realize that we're being conned and to what point do we allow ourselves to be conned?

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

Ya called Fargo yet?” “No, I’ve been too busy trying to destroy the Guild and corrupt Simon’s soul. Being evil is a full-time job.

People have become so selfish that they no longer care for others, or anything other than their own welfare.

Acting isn't a game of "pretend." It's an exercise in being real.

Well, we all are what we are, I guess you might say by an accident of birth.