I think making small movies reminds you of the effort. When you make big movies, the effort is to fight for freedom. When you make small movies, the effort is making the day, making the budget, and it's great, too.

I think that in the past, in the '50s and '60s, after the existentialists and beatniks and hippie movements, the big deal was, Don't sell out. We live in a society that by virtue of the speed we communicate and sell, everything sells. The danger is buying in; that your concern becomes success, rather than fulfillment. They're two different beasts, and my feeling is that you should seek fulfillment. You should not measure your worth in how much you have or how popular you are, but how happy you are with what you do.

Oliver Stone will never be happy with the first take. He wants more than that. When you’re delivering your lines, he’ll stop you and tell you some kind of riddle about the character and you have to go away and figure that out. If you’re hoping for him to give you all the answers, then you’re in for a long day.

for in the absence of God he had found Man. Man killing man, man helping man, both of them anonymous: the scourge and the blessing.

Night is real. Night is not an absence of light, but in fact, it is daytime that is a brief respite from the looming darkness.

We are such skeptics that we find it difficult to believe in God and angels and a spiritual afterlife, but a moment of fear makes our spirit so vulnerable that it allows us to believe in something beyond that.

: There are only two on-buttons for fear, in any permutation you want. One is when something that shouldn't be is, meaning a presence. And, the other one is an absence.