In order to reinvent yourself, you have to dig deep and look at yourself. I'd lost my way creatively, and I was humbled, and so I think I got really basic about wanting to depict people in the ways that I find them amazing and funny and emotional and that I can relate to and do from an instinctive, gut place. People trying to survive ... That's what all my movies are about.

I hadn't made that movie before and when I ever met the real Joy Mangano, which happened because De Niro insisted we meet her and her father, that's what she felt like to us. She impressed us with her quiet, serene authority with herself.

What we assert, very often can become our reality. To some degree, everybody can try to shape and control their fate. Everybody picks an identity.

Bush was in a shithole on September 10th. 9/11 was the best thing that ever happened to him.

The idea that anyone would think their religious ideas make them morally superior is just preposterous.

The investigation of consciousness has come to be regarded suspiciously by most smart people and by most scientists. That's a legacy that began with the Inquisition, which considered non-Christian spiritual inquiry as blasphemous.

It's my experience that endings are never easy, and I think I'm not alone among filmmakers or writers in this.