We were extremely prescient in that we predicted the Soviet coup before it happened. That was kind of amazing.

Audiences may be stupid, but they are never wrong.

I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in.

The director is a bit analogous to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. It's a collaborative adventure.

Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.

A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built.

Art doesn't just happen by accident. It is about pulling out new tricks and trying new things.

Leo Tolstoy said the purpose of art is to teach you to love life. And that's what I want.

Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.

I'm not really interested in the exploding car or endless sort of dystopian fantasies and superheroes. None of that... that doesn't interest me very much.

There are moments in one's life where you look back and you say, 'Well, I wish I had done this differently.

Much of our lives are wasted by finding reality, even though we live in unstable nature and with many irrational laws.

The entire universe will eventually disintegrate but by then I hope to be in a safer place.

You can't steal a gift. Bird [Charlie Parker] gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.

I feel beautiful when I'm at peace with myself.

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. It is never a narrowing of the mind or a restriction of the human spirit or the country's spirit.

People's backyards are much more interesting than their front gardens, and houses that back on to railways are public benefactors.

Be winged arrows aiming at fulfillment and goal.

Works for me. For the ones we love, today we’re allies. Tomorrow we resume our natural order of mortal enemies. Gentlemen, and I use that term loosely for all of us, have we an accord? (Acheron)

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

The world worries about disability more than disabled people do.