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.

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

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.

We shall all respect the principle of each other and do nothing that would be regarded as an act oppression to any portion of the people

That fighting of a battle without belief is, I think, the sorriest task which ever falls to the lot of any man.

Love without conditions.

If a man is not aware of the existence of the moon, what can the moon do for him except continue sending its lights upon him?

How can it feel so perfect with someone one second, but then the next second everything’s suddenly all wrong?

I think my home is in that sort of the part of cinema that's disappeared is where I lived, that sort of mid-budget you know, drama. I suppose that's what I am known for.

I did not like this feeling of having feelings.

The death of over 120 white people is a very beautiful thing.

There is no economy in having one operation produce a part and another separate the good ones from the bad ones.

Writers must constantly ask: what I am trying to say? Surprisingly often, they don't know.