I'm a big believer that, in life, we can't succeed in everything. Most times, we lose.

Nothing's harder than writing. There's no comparison. With directing, you can bounce a lot of ideas around. There's tremendous support - you've got editors and sound mixers. With writing, it's all you, and it's just crippling when people tear up your pages.

It's funny because when Jason [Statham] was drowning I was filming with an iPhone. It may have been a bit insensitive but I just thought, "you know what, this was a magic moment". And I couldn't help him anyway because I didn't want to drown.

I'm astounded by people who take eighteen years to write something. That's how long it took that guy to write Madame Bovary, and was that ever on the best-seller list?

I've always said that the artist dies twice. And the first death is the hardest which is the career death, the creative death. The physical death is an inevitability.

Painting is as close as a person can get to actually capturing the heat of the moment.

Every morning, I crawl out of bed. I sit there and think, 'Do I really need this?' And I drag myself to the gym in my garage. It's not fun. I hate it. I work out alone. Weights.