“Education is the single most important job of the human race.”

I’m extremely grateful that I discovered my passion. I love movies. I love to watch them, I love to make them.

Working hard is very important. You’re not going to get anywhere without working extremely hard.

We were always dreaming of how it was going to be.

We are all living in cages with the door wide open.

Being in Washington is more fictional than being in Hollywood.

You need peers; you need people who are at the same level you are. You never know in life when you’re going to need help, and you never know who you’re going to need it from.

All democracies turn into dictatorships – but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea.

If America is the pursuit of happiness, the best way to pursue happiness is to help other people.

Success is when you try to achieve your inward vision externally and have it come off the way you see it. Then YOU feel successful about it; that’s how success is measured.

Train yourself to let go of the things you fear to lose.

I’ve discovered that most critics themselves are cinematically illiterate. They don’t really know much about movies. They don’t know the history. They don’t know the technology. They don’t know anything. So for them to try to analyze it, they’re lost.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

It’s not a matter of how well can you make a movie. It’s how well can you make it under the circumstance, because there’s always circumstances. You cannot use that as an excuse.

Someday you’re going to have to learn to separate what seems to be important from what really is important.

The one way the world hasn’t changed: teaching is still the most important job.

But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences – is very, very important to actually being able to make movies.

Growing up poor, I didn’t even have a lunch to take to school.

I used to play baseball. I was playing even in high school.

If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man.

I lived in a project and didn’t have a good education. But, I’d listen to the preacher, who said that God would show me the way. Everything starts from that confidence.

We need to teach boys to respect girls.

All my mates are at university, and it’s a life I haven’t had a chance to enjoy, so it’s great to turn up and sample a bit of it.

I was very quiet until I got at the piano, and weekends, lunch breaks, after school, before school, I was just making music.

I was in the hockey team in school, played football. One of the challenges for me was to make the team feel better. It helped me evolve, so batting at different positions was never a problem.