“A film has its own life and takes its own time.”

I think they are very important because westerns have a code and a symbolism.

There are different reasons to make movies.

I would love to get great performances from actors as a director, because that’s what I’m always looking for, a director that’s going to help me go places I’ve never been before.

You can go left, you can go right, I don’t give a damn. Just make a decision.

You have respect and reverence for your characters and the fact that you’re going to epitomize that person for the rest of their lives. They’re going to be judged based on your performance by millions of people. You have a certain responsibility.

I think women can be as cruel as men, and men as tender as women, and vice versa.

I can think of films that I’m producing right now that are extremely hard-hitting, graphic films, that nobody necessarily wants to see, graphic in terms of violence, of adult content and racial and historical subject matter.

Filmmaking is a difficult process. There are the logistics of making a film. You have to do your part, and then change the entire thing around to do someone else’s part. A lot of the magic is lost, in between that, and you have to figure out how to get it back.

I owned a 1972 Plymouth Valiant that we bought for $125. It was infested with cockroaches and geckos – it was its own little ecosystem.

But I guess I like playing flawed guys ’cause it gives a place for the characters to go.

I got as much information as I could, so I wouldn’t look stupid, but this is a post 9/11 world and there’s only so much you can do with the FBI in terms of research.

I think every actor wants to be an FBI or cop at one point.

The day you stop caring what other people think of you is the day your life begins.

The only morality in a cruel world is chance.

If it helps me in the way that if this movie is successful, I get to make more films, great, and the more films that I make and the more interest that I’m allowed to cover, the better for me and the better, hopefully, for the people who like to watch me.

Well, I’ve thought many times when my career was in the toilet, that I was going to have to seriously consider getting another job, I don’t know what I’d do.

And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.

Finding your own style is not easy, but once found it brings complete happiness. It gives you self-confidence, always.

Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.

The stars in the sky are really other suns like our own, around which orbit other planets. (paraphrase)