“Making money is not gonna change anything about what I am, except I won’t answer the door.”

I’m a lapsed Buddhist like I’m a lapsed Catholic. I take it to a point.

How you look to help other people, and how you get out of this ‘I, me, mine’ type of thing.

The actors that I love to work with, they’re hard on me. They’re pushing me.

I don’t want to live anywhere where I’m breathing two million cars’ fumes and paying a zillion dollars for the right to be totally hassled.

I direct, and I make movies I can’t finance. I can’t raise money. I can’t sell anything. I make things.

I’m not a big fan of talking about dying. And then I make a movie where I kill everybody.

I don’t need to push myself. I don’t need to sharpen my own knife and slit my throat.

I don’t have a problem with Werner Herzog.

I’m living in a real postmodern time – every single thing sings to you to tell you it’s started, it’s stopped, you’ve got a message, you didn’t get a message.

Most filmmaking is about shaking hands and just starting.

And get off your spot and take that knowledge you have not to fix yourself into a place but to keep going.

I grew up in the ’60s, which was a creative time, so it wasn’t that big of a stretch to go from a baseball bat to a guitar to a film camera.

Рow can we be, even if it is the last day on earth? It’s like Christmas Eve. “Okay, it’s going to be Christmas.

There’s a difference between the world ending tomorrow and just drinking and drugging yourself to death.

Life is what happens when you’re doing other things, right?

Movies are only the result of where we are as human beings.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about.

When we’re not defending and justifying, and we’re being very still, our answers can and do shock us.

Who am I, and where am I going? You are the answer to this question. You are here to ask the question, and to be the answer.

Meditation and prayer have withstood the test of time. They work today as perfectly as they did for those who first practised and perfected them.

It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it

One of the reasons I’ve felt so connected to poetry throughout the years is because it’s the only art form that has breath built into it. And I need that breath now. I need that breath so much. So, yes, it is a refuge for me. Absolutely.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

A lot of the questions that anyone would naturally have about their family, you’ll get much of the answers for, or at least hints to where it will go, in the future.