Like a lot of people my age, I grew up on Amblin movies. They're a part of who I am as a filmmaker and, arguably, as a person.
We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.
The great paradox of the 21st century is that, in this age of powerful technology, the biggest problems we face internationally are problems of the human soul.
People don't really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.
Bad news has good legs.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
When it comes to sending my children to college, I want the best education. It's the only thing I'm really leaving them - a good education.
The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.
My body really, really wanted to reproduce when I was 15. It took a lot of civilization, socialization, willpower and some emulsion polymerization technology for me not to reproduce at 15.
People say to me that I'm a role model in technology, but it makes me laugh, because I'm not a technologist, I'm a journalist - that's my background.
I'm not a techno-determinist. I believe we need to improve our existing human resources, and technology can only be a complement.
There is technology where you can watch the match live online and also on TV. If people understood the game, I'm sure we would have a lot of chess fans by now.
In my first company, Seer Technologies, where I was chief technology officer, we shied away from the media. We watched every word and were guarded in front of journalists.
I try to be objective about technology. Agnostic, in a sense. Whatever personal opinions I form tend to have more to do with what we find to do with the new thing.
I think there's a tendency to think geeks and nerds are just sweet guys that were picked on, but that hasn't been my experience. I'm certainly not like that, in a lot of ways.
Cinema is my religion. It is a way to make people sensitive, through emotions. To make them feel, experience empathy. People are touched and act ethically when they are emotionally touched.
I think one of the things that was a huge surprise to everyone with 'Silence of the Lambs' was that that was an Oscar-winning horror movie. It struck such a nerve with audiences that it was a very particular, special experience.
I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.
You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.
I learn so much from watching films like that with commentary and then when you get to hear another filmmaker talk about their films it's a really great experience.
I imagined that it might be awkward to talk to your wife about her performance, so going into it I was a little nervous. But doing it was actually a wonderfully inspiring experience.
