The bigger the budget, the less an audience is trusted, and that's the difference between a big-budget film and a small-budget film.

In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.

People are usually pretty hungry after a funeral. I guess it's because we all realize that time is running out and we better eat all we can. Please don't mention that to my mother.

I feel like there's a certain kind of laughter missing in the world.

I don't want to write my life. I live my life. I want to make up a new world.

I want to write stories that don't help you escape life, but embrace life.

There is nothing more depressing than toast that no one eats.

People love conversation, and movies are conversations, and an audience has to participate; it has to fill in some blanks.

I spent so many years trying to become an actor, trying to be a person that I wasn't.

I want to make accessible movies for bright people, but I don't want to play games and be coy.

My job as a dramatist is to find out where these characters want to go, and make it as hard as possible for them to get there.

With the right tools, you can write anything ...

Also expressionistic filmmaking - making the audience feel like they were inside the characters' heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.

He was one of the few political leaders I have ever met whose public speeches revealed more than his private conversations. [On Ronald Reagan]

The power of evil men lives on the cowardice of the good.

They look outside the windows of their apartment in town and realize they're not living in a terrace anymore. This is a room full of dreamers who like to go to London for a day.

Literature is what you write when you think you should be saying something. Writing begins when you'd rather be doing anything else: and you've just done it.

I know what "custody" [of the children] means. "Get even." That's all custody means. Get even with your old lady.

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

San Franciscans are very proud of their city, and they should be. It’s the most beautiful place in the world.