We honor life when we work. The type of work is not important: the fact of work is. All work feeds the soul if it is honest and done to the best of our abilities and if it brings joy to others.

Healthy mysticism praises acts of letting go, of being emptied, of getting in touch with the space inside and expanding this until it merges with the space outside. Space meeting space; empty pouring into empty. Births happen from that encounter with emptiness, nothingness. . . . Let us not fight emptiness and nothingness, but allow it to penetrate us even as we penetrate it.

When our inner self connects to our work and our work to our inner self, the work knows no limit, for the inner self knows no limit.

Compassion is not pity ... compassion never considers an object as weak or inferior. Compassion, one might say, works from a strength born of awareness of shared weakness, and not from someone else's weakness. And from the awareness of the mutuality of us all. Thus to put down another as in pity is to put down oneself.

It is precisely the despair of our times that convinces me that a renaissance is right around the corner.

After 'Lost', I never need to take a job for the money again.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.