When Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money!

When you're working on a script, every word that's on the page, somebody has to read it. Make every word count in your stories.

Everything I've made - it doesn't mean they've all been good - but everything I've made so far, big or little, fiction or documentary, has been something that I've been really enthusiastic about.

I'm guided by my enthusiasm.

I also feel that the only thing more gratifying than working with someone who you've worked well with is working with someone new and coming up with something great.

If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something.

I like finding a great shot and then just staying with it for a long time, not trying to pump things up with some kind of artificial energy by cutting.

It's a funny thing with documentary films - you want them to feel as entertaining and as gripping as a fictional film. With a fictional film you want it to feel as realistic as a documentary film.

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing.

Music films are great, but they can never compete with a live performance. Live music is what it is. It's the whole point. You experience it in the moment.

Two passing jetliners reported to controllers they’d seen a man with a gun seated on a deck chair at eleven thousand feet…

Ah, if in this world there were no such thing as cherry blossoms, perhaps then in springtime our hearts would be at peace.

And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.

Modern theologians are like a pack of dogs who spend most of their time sniffing each other's behinds.

A Jap's a Jap. There is no way to determine their loyalty... This coast is too vulnerable. No Jap should come back to this coast except on a permit from my office.

Free people have a right to decide for themselves what they want to hear.

It's good to see that America has a hub for electronic music in Vegas, like Europe has with Ibiza.

You are the weirdest girl ever.” “Please. You live with Eve.

I'm sort of like a specialist. I go in, do what I do and every four years, they get tired of me and I have to relocate myself.

Eight hours work, eight hours sleep, and eight hours recreation - Brigham Young