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

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.

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.

I'm someone who can create critiques of individuals based on their economic history. That's one way I look at people in terms of one story that could be told purely in a Marxist construction.

August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road, but juice gathers in the berries.

Don’t be afraid to make people mad. Your honesty will inspire your true followers. I piss off tons of people every day.

Nobody can go back to how it was. The dust bowl dried us all up bitter as seeds and spat us out all over the land and none of us yet has taken root.

To me, mathematics, computer science, and the arts are insanely related. They're all creative expressions.

Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.

It is the way you feel that is your point of attraction.

Making a movie with Lindsay Lohan is not for the faint of heart.

As long as what is is-and Georgia is Georgia-I will take Harlem for mine. At least, if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from.

I have nice ears. I have no lobes, which was disappointing for a while, but I've gotten over it and learned to love them. Being lobeless isn't the end of the world

At my age the bones are water in the morning until food is given them.