“If you want to make a movie, make it. Don’t wait for a grant, don’t wait for the perfect circumstances, just make it.”

You name any horrific thing, and I can make a joke out of it.

If there is something magic about the collaborations I have with actors it’s because I put the character first.

That’s how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing.

Emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It’s when a scene works emotionally and it’s cool and clever, then it’s great. That’s what you want.

Dogs got personality. Personality goes a long way.

If I’ve made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I’ve accomplished something.

When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.

Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character.

You can’t write poetry on the computer.

The good ideas will survive.

Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I’m not interested in, I can’t even feign interest.

I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.

One thing I don’t understand is that average American movie-goers cannot watch a movie for three hours, yet they’ll watch a stupid, boring, horrific football game for four hours. Now, that is boredom at its most colossal.

I’ve always considered myself a filmmaker who writes stuff for himself to do.

I don’t judge my characters, and that’s my job not to judge them. It’s my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.

We are not responsible for the circumstances we are in, but we are responsible for the way we allow those circumstances to affect us; we can either allow them to get on top of us or we can allow them to transform us into what God wants us to be.

Always Do Your Best. Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

You lose power to the people and circumstances you judge. They capture your attention in the same way that a movie does.

The circumstances that surround a man’s life are not important. How that man responds to those circumstances IS IMPORTANT. His response is the ultimate determining factor between success and failure.

Meet everybody and every circumstance on the battlefield of life with the courage of a hero and the smile of a conqueror.

It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence upon us.

God has a purpose behind every problem. He uses circumstances to develop our character. In fact, he depends more on circumstances to make us like Jesus than he depends on our reading the Bible.