I'm in no way suggesting that I succeed, but it's inspiring to read somebody who does succeed and from whom, in a general way, you can draw examples and nourishment and sustenance.

I don't really know what I want, other than good sequences, whatever that means. What I find is always a matter of chance, judgment, and luck.

Documentary filmmaking ruins you for real life, because you learn to be extremely attentive.

I'm drawn to making movies about contemporary life. The reason I choose institutions is because they provide a limit, a boundary.

I'm interested in ordinary experience, and regardless of the precise definition of ordinary, and I've found that in so-called ordinary experience, there is as much comedy, tragedy, sadness, as there is in great drama. And I don't invent it, I recognize it.

Even if I know I'm going to go to a church, I don't know what the minister's going to say.

This whole business of documentary being a second-class citizen is bullshit. A documentary can be as interesting, as dramatic, as sad, as funny, blah, blah, blah, as a fiction movie. Or it can be as awful as a fiction movie!