It's crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.

I'm not afraid of dying tomorrow, only of being killed.

The hardest thing in making a movie is to keep in the front of your consciousness your original response to the material. Because that's going to be the thing that will make the movie. And the loss of that will break the movie.

If Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda had a baby, it would be Matthew Modine.

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.

I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.

What do you take me for? A fourteen karat sucker?