I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.

Film is a collaborative business: bend over.

A liberal pretending to be a conservative? That's like a straight person pretending to be gay to get greater acceptance.

The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

A man stands alone at the plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone. But in the field, what? Part of a team.

The surprise is half the battle. Many things are half the battle, losing is half the battle. Let's think about what's the whole battle.