I love music, of course, and many, many, many genres. There are hardly any songs I would say that I hate. There's a couple, and I don't even know exactly why I don't like them.

I find the joy of the 'doing' increases. Creativity increases. Intuition increases. The pleasure of life grows. And negativity recedes.

I supported myself by delivering the 'Wall Street Journal' and doing odd jobs. I love plumbing and carpentry.

Stories hold conflict and contrast, highs and lows, life and death, and the human struggle and all kinds of things.

Meditation is not a selfish thing. Even though you're diving in and experiencing the Self, you're not closing yourself off from the world. You're strengthening yourself, so that you can be more effective when you go back into the world.

Directors who have inspired me include Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini, lngmar Bergman, John Ford, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Ernst Lubitsch. In art school, I studied painters like Edward Hopper, who used urban motifs, Franz Kafka is my favorite novelist. My approach to film stems from my art background, as I go beyond the story to the sub-conscious mood created by sound and images.

I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we're all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist.