I was on cruise control from '85 to '95, and it was my fault. There were a lot of self-inflicted wounds, when I was not doing any original material. I wasn't directing. I wasn't writing. That's not who I am.

There is an age-old proverb that really does hold true in every area of life - in relations between nations and right down to the most subtle and sophisticated or must unstable and unsophisticated relations between lovers - and it is this: they took "kindness" for "weakness."

When you're younger you just want to go out and make your mark in the world and doing that, quite often, the people that you love the most and the people you should be closest to suffer from estrangement. I'd be gone nine months a year, so how do you know anyone? When you come home you are a stranger.

Consider the source...Don't be a fool by listening to a fool.

In this day and age, if you're aspiring to be an actor, and you're putting all your eggs in one basket, you could be disappointed. I started out as an actor, but I forced myself to be a writer, even though I wasn't very good at it and had never written. I don't think I ever passed an English course in my life. My first 8 to 10 scripts were pretty horrendous, but I stayed at it until I eventually found a voice and a subject that people were interested in. So, I recommend that you go out and try to be as versatile as possible: writer, actor, producer and especially director.

Art is the ability to communicate through an intermediary and to convey one's feelings through an isolated object. It's inspiration and incubation. Putting my subjective feelings into an objective form and then on to you for a subjective interpretation.

Most of the films I myself like don't do very well. Every director, he has a choice, whether to go for subtlety and try to articulate every minute detail, or to go for the broad strokes and hope that the people will fill in between the lines. I tend to go for the broader strokes.