Stanley Kubrick was a big inspiration. People accuse me of never using my own material. But when did Kubrick? You look at his films and they are completely unique... completely separate entities.

A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should.

The Exorcist' is amazing because it recognizes that silences can be as powerful as sound effects.

If you're going to succeed, you've got to be like one of those punch-drunk fighters in the old Warner Bros. boxing pictures: too stupid to fall down, you just keep slugging and stay on your feet.

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

I think a story should take as long to tell as it is appropriate to that particular story.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film.

Boy, I'd hate to shoot on tape or disc or whatever the hell they're talking about. I love film.

The amazing thing about any movie is not whether it's good, but that it got made at all.

I just tell you what a pleasure it is to get back to the kind of filmmaking I used to be allowed to do.

Education makes your maths better, not necessarily your manners.

The door of the visible church is incomparably wider than the door of heaven (522)[.]

Better to play dumb than to go as smartass… after all smartasses get what they deserve in the end.

Hope is one of those things in life you cannot do without.

It's one of my favorite seasons of the year: Back to School. As a kid, I loved fresh school supplies, new outfits, the change of seasons, and the chance to crack open a new textbook.

James Bond has a license to kill, rockstars have a license to be outrageous. Rock is about grabbing people's attention.

All men have their appointed time; that's something no horse can change.

What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bee and he told me about the butcher and my wife.

It is a commentary on Berlin in 1931 that ... it was 'My Yiddishe Momme' that the Berlin Broadcasting Company asked for.

The one thing that advances a society is not technology or so-called development; its love - that one principle.