I used to say that interviewing others was perhaps the way I could stop talking and start listening. It's a kind of enforced silence.

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

I've never seen myself as a documentary filmmaker. I see myself as a filmmaker, period, and I am interested in drama as well as in documentary.

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.

People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

The smarter people I know declined to watch the most recent debate [with Donald Trump].