All of the things that have happened in my life have been self-propelled. I can't blame anybody else or point a finger at anybody.

The best movies are simple.

There's no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist. You give Terrence Malick a movie like Transformers, and he's f***ed. There's no way for him to exist in that world... Lars Von Trier's dangerous. He scares me. And I'm only going to work now when I'm terrified.

We're living through the twilight of American economic dominance.

My first car, I got it in an auction at my temple. It was an '86 Volvo that I got for 500 bucks, and then wound up throwing $10,000 into the stereo system and put TVs in the foot rests. It was the most ridiculous Volvo you'd ever seen, but I had never had money before and I was out of my mind.

I turned down twelve films last year... Huge money films, but I had no respect for the writer or the work.

And yeah, my handicap was down to a 10 when we were at the thick of it. I trained for six or seven months, golfing every day for six hours, seven days a week, with eight trainers. It was intense.