Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
The point of psychoanalysis is to really understand the roots of your behavior. Understand why you are doing the things you're doing - and connect your unconscious to your conscious.
A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.
I'm engaged: I'm interested in other people. I think that's just as important as knowing how to do the job.
I'm not a master; I'm just a hard-working filmmaker. I would like everyone to see me as a friend rather than a master.
I think I have been stereotyped as an action director in Hollywood, so all I got were the action scripts.
'Hard Boiled' is my last film in Hong Kong, before I moved to the U.S. It is the one film which is most accepted by the audience in the West.
We'll probably live 20 more years than our grandparents did. The question is, what are you going to do with those extra 20 years?
I've always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn't know, and with 'Case Histories' I just decide to make that more up-front.
I did gymnastics when I was growing up and to this day I can still do the splits.
You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.
My key interest in choosing scripts is character-driven stories, because there are so many stories that sacrifice character for plot.
I made all their videos, apart from the last two, so if you ever see an Abba video on TV then it's my stuff.
People go to the zoo and they like the lion because it's scary. And the bear because it's intense, but the monkey makes people laugh.
To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.
I am not very tough with raising my children, but you can argue that to be more tough will help your children.
Do you know how long it took me to write 'For a Few Dollars More'? Nine days.
I'm trying to talk about challenging subjects people might not like and trying to find relief as we discuss it.
Just doing a project because it's an opportunity won't create meaning. As an artist, I need something to communicate.
In my household, a Trapper-Keeper was too expensive - we had plain old three-ring notebooks - and I always wanted a Trapper-Keeper.
If I've still got my pants on in the second scene, I think they've sent me the wrong script.
