You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people.

An artist makes a painting, and nobody bugs him or her about it. It's just you and your painting. To me, that's the way it should be with film as well.

More and more people are seeing the films on computers - lousy sound, lousy picture - and they think they've seen the film, but they really haven't.

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business - everything.

I quit smoking in December. I’m really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.

I've loved music always, and my music fire was lit by Elvis Presley, really, and all that was happening back then.

In my case what happened is that within about two weeks of beginning meditation, the anger already started to go away. My wife came to me and said, "What's going on?" and I said, "What are you talking about?" To which she replied, "This anger, where did it go?" I didn't even realize that my anger had been going away.