Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different, and you cannot assume that what worked before will work today.

I want my movies to play in movie theaters. While festivals can fulfill a part of that, there's nothing like getting a week-long run for your movie. It's becoming increasingly difficult to get that.

Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own belief and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware.

I often daydream about the future, thinking of the world in 100, 200 years, imagining what it looks like, feels like. I hope that my books are like ghosts that will inhabit this future.

There is something I call social intelligence. You can do a lot in life on your own and you can do all kinds of stuff, but if you're really bad with people, if you're really naive or aggressive and push people away, if you don't know the political environment you're in, it invalidates all the things you know. You're not going to get anywhere.

It's sometimes hard to talk about politics and art. Obviously, I have my core beliefs, but I think art is best when it's troublesome and pushes against stuff.

News makes things black and white. Documentary filmmaking should do the opposite.