I dream for a living. Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I see another movie I want to make.

All of my movies are about how I wish the world would work. I've made very few movies about how the world worked. I could name them on one and a half hands, about how my movies have been very reflective of how the world was exactly. A lot of my movies are really about the way I wish the world was, and that's what this whole art form is all about. It's an interpretive art form.

There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.

Desperate times require desperate measures. What Lincoln and the Lobbyist for the Amendment and the Manager of the Amendment and himself, what they did to get this passed was not illegal. It was murky, but what they did was noble and grand. How they went about it was somewhat murky. Nothing they did was really illegal.

All good ideas start out as bad ideas, that's why it takes so long.

You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project. Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.

I made 'Empire of the Sun' in Shanghai in the 1980s and want to come back one day to make a movie in China.