I don't think Steve [Jobs] started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind - I think that was something he believed.

I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission.

The stuff about film being a collaborative medium is no joke.

You see the natural progression of what happens when the executive gets power and then a new executive comes in. The new executive doesn't say, "Oh, man. The president has just got too much power. We're going to dial that back." No, they expand the power. It's like, "He didn't use it well, so I'm going to take more power and use it better because I'm a better guy and my values are better." Then you suddenly realize that the very people who were attacking Guantánamo prior to getting into office are now the people expanding an assassination program overseas.

Long ago I had a professor who told me, 'Embrace the contradictions.' I think that is what is most interesting about people like Jobs.

One of the things about Steve Jobs is that he gives us an opportunity to look at the disjuncture between that world and the world he claimed that Apple represented, the "Think different" world of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Gandhi.

If people are portrayed as monsters, we become disconnected from them, and to me that is not remotely interesting.