I was brought up by great parents and great grandparents who told me, 'Never, ever think that you're better than anyone else or that what you do is so important that the world won't miss you once you're gone,' and I kind of translate that into the st...
I became a loner. I became a mountain man. A lot of those things are very good qualities and they help you do your work, help you be singular and keep the artistic integrity of your work intact, but they don't make it very easy to live your life.
The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual's greed for power and the el...
I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.
Everyone's parents were famous actors at my school, pretty much! I think I went to school with Paris Hilton when I was three. That's what L.A. is, though - it's an industry town. You go to school with kids and you think, 'Well that's normal, they mak...
God knows and sees all. His wisdom and knowledge far outweighs mankind, and whether or not people ever recognize it - He is the creator. He is the giver of life, and only He has the power to take it away. That's why its imperative to submit to Him.
In 1979, I moved to England and photographed Joy Division and Bowie and Beefheart. At that time I got images that I felt had that special, well - power is a big word to say - more like intimacy and ambition that outlasted the photo shoot. I felt that...
When I was a kid, I knew the black and white version of 'Jane Eyre,' and I guess I became interested in the idea of romantic love - of unrequited love and the tragedies of that; of what are the important things in life; what should one value over oth...
It's not very fashionable, but I love life, and I believe that things disappear and reappear and nothing ever solidifies, no matter how middle-class, housebroken, staid, and solitary someone's life seems to be. That, I think, is what I'm writing abou...
The wish fulfillment of growing younger is not necessarily all it's cracked up to be. You have new problems that arise which you are not anticipating and you deal with the same problems you would deal with if you were ageing normally: what is the end...
Free time keeps me going. It's just something that's always been a part of my life. I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experiment...
What's the shelf life of a 1931 movie? If it still exists, there will always be film buffs and a niche audience who will want to see it. But in terms of people even understanding in common usage, some of the words we use to describe these movies, I d...
Many of the things that I have written on have focused, at least a big part of the story, on adolescents. I think that in that period of life, so much happens, and it's the period of life where you're forming into an adult. In certain ways, you're al...
That's the thing that I've always kind of kept in the back of my head in writing about teens, that everything is so important, all the time, every day. Every day of your life, you're changing and making decisions and everything is an emergency to you...
I don't want to just add another DVD to the pile. So I think, 'Is this going to have an impact and some lasting value? Is it worth it for me to spend two years of my middle-aged life on this?' They're my criteria, and I think that's led me to more ur...
I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal wo...
It's not about me - four simple words that described the life of Christ. Do you call yourself a Christian? Well then, you're not off the hook. You don't get to claim 'Me, myself, and I' as your four words. 'It's not about me' should describe your lif...
The thing you can't let go of is gravity. The reality of gravity in writing. If someone says something really mean in a sitcom, and the next wave isn't a reaction to the reality of that, you start losing relatability. In a lot of romantic comedies, t...
What I do is spend too much time thinking. Most of the time I just walk around annoyed. Would I describe myself as relatively happy, I suppose, but society gets to me. And the people that have mastered life seem to not care, and then they die, and th...
If you're at the Oscars, there's not a man on that red carpet who is not wearing make-up. Most straight actors I know get quite used to it. Even when they go out in real life they grab some sort of bronzer and they throw it on. They dye their eyebrow...
I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel pressed and tense almost every day of my life about something or other. And I think it's the one thing, as I look into people's eyes, that I think I share with almost everybody.
