“But when I felt like I had something to prove? Then I got up early every morning and worked all day long. I didn’t know if I had any more talent than anyone else directing, but I knew I could work hard at it, and so I did.”

I try new things and give myself permission to fail and experiment because only that way can you get really successful.

I really think that everybody would like to be an actor. Why wouldn’t they? It’s great work if you can get it. The one thing that prevents most people from saying, ‘I’m just gonna go to Hollywood!’ is that it seems unrealistic.

A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you a reason he can’t. Either way a sale is made, the only question is: Who is gonna close?

I feel things more deeply anything to do with kids. It just makes a big difference in my life Having a child is like taking the deepest core vulnerable aspect of myself, reaching in and taking it outside of my body.

I don’t go back and look at the monitor between every take; I wait until I feel like we finally got it right: “Let me stop and look at that last one on the monitor.”

There’s something really great and romantic about being poor and sleeping on couches.

You’re basically the sum of all the experiences you’ve ever had, and they’re sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

How about the more than 1 billion Muslim people in the U.S, who aren’t fanatical, who don’t punch women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches, and pray five times a day?

My professional success is really important to me, and my career is really important to me. It’s the most important thing to me outside of my family. I take it very seriously and work really, really hard at it. Family comes first, but this is something that’s really important to me too.

My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I’m 31-years-old, and I don’t want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It’s humiliating.

I want to thank my wife who I don’t normally usually associate with Iran. I want to thank you for working on our marriage for 10 Christmases. It’s good. It is work, but it’s the best kind of work, and there’s no one I’d rather work with!

God help me if I ever do another movie with an explosion in it. If you see me in a movie where stuff is exploding you’ll know I’ve lost all my money.

When you hire great actors, you’re lucky, so you just try to create an atmosphere where they can succeed and relax and take risks. You’re happy that you get to watch them at the monitor and that your name is on the director’s chair.

I’m not the most loathsome man in the world. I’ve dropped to number nine.

I’m sure I can make a movie that doesn’t feel like a seventies movie! But the truth is, that’s my favorite era in American filmmaking. To me, those were the great years.

Its not who you love. Its how.

You understand what good directing is, you can identify it pretty easily.

Sometimes the impact of Mozart’s music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy.

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.

I wanted to be sure that my donation did two things: went directly into the hands of hurricane victims and that it was an amount that could really impact their lives and make a difference.

How much I daydream about heaven and how much I believe I’m going there are probably directly proportional.

I want to speak to people directly as much as possible.

The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.

When people feel like they are being spoken directly to, I do feel like… they’ll do things like turn out in an off-year, mid-year primary.