I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

I didn't have any set idea of what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to tell stories that meant something to me, but I never said I was going to be the weird, avant-garde guy.

It's kinda like D.H. Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road, and instead of just passing and glancing away, they decide to accept what he calls the confrontation between their souls. It's like freeing the brave, reckless gods within us all.

I can't help but think that at the end of your life, when you look back, there'll be a tone. And that tone will come from the essence of how you live your day to day what you did in that between time because that is really your life.

…[Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.

I have a lot of women friends - I feel like I finally matured a little. But initially I was attracted to some of them. I liked everything they were about. I think men are just taught: "Okay, well then, I should try to have sex with them." I'm just lucky that it went in the friendship direction, and it became a much stronger bond that's lasted a long time. You wonder how many potentially great friends you lose along the way because you become lovers and it is so painful when it's over and you can't turn it into a positive friendship.

I'd be fine to make movies and have them never come out. But you have to deal with the business side. You can't get too emotionally invested, because again, you've got no control. There's going to be some huge film out that everyone goes to, and it probably won't be mine.