Family is the last and greatest discovery. It is our last miracle.

I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.

There has to be some mystery in life, because the joy of being a writer and the joy of being a musician is the joy of discovery. I don't want someone discovering for me what I should be discovering on my own. If a person is discovering for me, then they're living for me. It's my responsibility, indeed it's my privilege, to go out and discover the world for myself.

There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's.

If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.

My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, "Come as you are."

I wish all critics, no matter their color, were more sophisticated when it comes to the moral questions a film like 'St. Anna' is trying to raise.