We all hope. It's what keeps us alive.

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.

I look back on my liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder - as another exercise in self-involvement - rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.

The conscious mind is going to suggest the obvious, the cliché, because these things have offered the security of having succeeded in the past.

The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.

The product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create.