When working on and writing a film, I'm often more of a sponge than other times, aware of what's going on around me.

To be a creative person and be a professional, as an artist you have to be able to withstand pain, rejection, and for some, a lot of bad feelings, but you have to be able to look through those.

All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That’s what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.

To me, honesty and the difficulty of honest communication are at the heart of both my life and my movies. The difficulty of being yourself.

You are always factoring in the economy within the process of creating something, and making decisions that seem both fearless and full of fear.

I'm a version of the same person.

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.

The questions of economics, and how they infect, or rather how they affect intimacy. And that's probably the subject of all my films.

For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional.

I'm interested in what actors reveal about themselves through the structure of the character.

Everyday is a gift and a very special day

Fate determines a man's beginning. The man, by choice, determines his end.

Are you okay?”“Well, I’d prefer to be in my own bedroom at home, dreaming of ponies and rainbows, but since I’m stuck here, I guess I’m as good as I can be.

The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.

[T]he young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.

The more perfect one becomes, the less he is inclined to speak of the imperfections of others.

When you're a comedian, the Holy Grail is an hour long HBO special.

Dutch is not so much a language as an ailment of the throat.

Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It's a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment.

We shouldn't be willy-nilly creating potential human life just to satisfy the urges of the scientific community.