Nicholas Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare.

Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.

When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.

You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.

I like smart movies about smart people, and enjoy it when most of the facts are on the table and we can contemplate them together.

When we go to the movies, we identify with the characters we see. That's why we go to the movies; we have a voyeuristic experience; we have an out of the body experience. The screen is more real than our thoughts are at the moment we are looking at the film and we place ourselves in the place of the people on the screen, and when they behave nobly, it makes us feel noble, when they are sad and when they have lost love, we feel sad; we can identify with that.

We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We're kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.