The thing about The Departed, the x-factor that people can't quite put their finger on, is that it deals clearly with class and accent all these things that are fundamental to Boston, but previously anomalous or even prohibited in demotic American films.

The thing about movies is if somebody has an idea that works, it's in, and I say that as a screenwriter as well as a director.

You're not turning the picture over to a system or a process, you are the process, and the most important thing is to have things exactly as you want them.

Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he's just read you just got six figures out of Warner Bros - which incidentally was not true.

I was particularly anxious that I shoot the tires out of the class system. All it is these days is a hobby of certain masochists, and certain sadists.

I don't trust a lot of popular films because they seem to indicate that people would like to be super-heroes or vampires, and that's the last thing I mean by the useful mirror of art.

Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.