The less money and time you have, the more you haveto plan ahead and be careful about your coverage. It's like a gas:it expands or contracts depending on the size of the container.

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.

Grace abounds for a greater work.

Eat, sleep and drink music.

I love the pleasure of finding the same truth in two different places. It has a lot to do with a soul.

The only thing different between sinners and saints is one is forgiven and the other ain't.

Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed. It is nobler when it is a deed.

I didn't know you were Catholic.

An image has stuck for most of my career and it isn't flattering.

Parenting is a stage of life's journey where the milestones come about every fifty feet.

The subconscious is ahead of the conscious, and we never know what really drives us.

I am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment.