"Marketing has supplanted story as the primary force behind the worthiness of making a film, and that's a very sad thing. It's film only as a function of consumerism rather than as an important component of our culture, and that's everywhere around the world."

"I mean, look, I love movies, not just the ones I make... In fact, I don't like the movies I make very much."

"Anytime you cast a movie and you need someone famous in the lead part, you're a prisoner of whoever happens to be famous in the six-month window in which you're trying to get a film financed."

"I don't feel despair because I am able to make the films I want to make, and that gives me hope."

"There's a small club of women who are willing to age."

"Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still."

"No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience, even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India."

"It's not the voting that's democracy it's the counting."