When you live with people you know them better than you care to.

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.

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing.

For what is magic, but passion freed from reason?

I chose and my world was shaken, so what? The choice may have been mistaken, the choosing was not.

Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into a genial life as acts of kindness and affection. Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers.

People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit.

Friendship means to be a strong hand in the dark to another in the time of need.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

Being humbled is always good for us, even if it doesn't feel good to us.

If you want something bad enough and you have that desire, you'll walk to another state or country if you have to.

Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.