“You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.”

You know, sometimes I feel like I walk around with a target on my back with the films I make.

Everything’s a film idea if this is what you do.I’ve always been secretly confident that I’d never run out of ideas,because I’ve never had any.

Well, visual language is another boring discussion about the nature of film.

I’m me, I live from film to mouth.

You learn real early to make a film and then duck, and basically that’s how I go about it.

Anyway, I just haven’t been able to find any humanity in any Republican candidate ever in my entire life.

It’s part of the general global hypnotism to accept lies as the new truth.

Human identity is the most fragile thing that we have, and it’s often only found in moments of truth.

I just live my life, see things theway I do, and I’m just looking for a notion to hang it all on.

Nick plays a corrupt politician, which is kind of a redundant statement.

Ever since I was a kid, I just loved those comedians on TV who would just have fun with the language.

It’s always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone’s seen the last one.

So one of the most unique things on screen in American movies today is everyday behavior.

Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one’s individuality.

Fashion can be bought by anybody; style takes discernment, it has to do with individuality.

Government is not a substitute for people, but simply the instrument through which they act. And if the individual fails to do his duty as a citizen, government becomes a very deadly instrument indeed.

The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.

Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.

They are a very extensive minority who have suffered discrimination and who have the same right to participation in the promise and fruits of society as every other individual.

At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one’s own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person’s skin.

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed…It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.