“When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films.’”

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.

You don’t have to know how to make a movie. If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can’t help but make a good movie.

I steal from every movie ever made.

Education is a liberating force, and in our age it is also a democratizing force, cutting across the barriers of caste and class, smoothing out inequalities imposed by birth and other circumstances.

A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue.

School is not the end but only the beginning of an education.

Education should be the handmaid of citizenship.

Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

Organizing is an educational process. The best educational process in the union is the picket line and the boycott. You learn about life.

In my travels all over the world, I have come to realize that what distinguishes one child from another is not ability, but access. Access to education, access to opportunity, access to love.