Whatever I was able to do with those experiences certainly contribute to whatever I'm able to do as a director. The corruption in that is that most of what I acted in the last 10 years was to steal film school time from these guys. Those were the people I thought I could learn from as a director.

If you can't count on your heart having some kind of unified response, you can't count on anything. You use your heart as a barometer for your movie's completeness.

If you don’t vote, you don’t matter.

I'm not going to recommend recklessness but somewhere just short of it - testing yourself and proactively pursuing a rite of passage has become necessary because in western developed countries we've become very comfort-addicted.

That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it's pure, it means that they do too.

Reputations are maintained by the outside world, and they're created by it, too, by and large. And they serve as a hell of a device for privacy, because the more people look for something that's not there, the less chance they have of violating who you are. It's like going out there with a mask on, without having to exercise your upper body to put it on.

Sense of self, and the way one shares it, is perhaps the most valuable and poetic gift in the arsenal of one's life and craft.