Directing is mystifying. It's a long, long, skid on an icy road, and you do the best you can trying to stay on the road... If you're still here when you come out of the spin, it's a relief. But you've got to have the terror if you're going to do anything worthwhile.

The unconscious is our best collaborator.

If you want to be a legend, God help you, it's so easy. You just do one thing. You can be the master of suspense, say. But if you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it's fun to do a lot of different things.

Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.

No doubt you are as alarmed as I by the tragic decline in America's language skills. If 10 people read the following sentence: Two tanker trucks has just overturned in Alaska, spilling a totel of 10,000 gallons of beer onto a highway. two would find an error in subject-verb agreement, two would find an error in spelling, and six would find a sponge and drive north.

I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That’s the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.

There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.