I never felt comfortable in real life very well. It's always been an awkward kind of thing for me and so when I hit the stage I just sensed freedom. I sensed, 'Here's a place that I can have all the experiences of life and not feel uncomfortable about it.'

If you're older you want to tell stories about the pool of human life and living and to communicate, not only to your age group but to do an age group that can begin to understand, that has enough experience of life far beyond the taste of life.

You have to struggle a bit, hustle a little, and be willing to go bankrupt. Once you're willing to do that, everything opens up and you get the freedom. My joke is that next year, I'll make the first film that costs zero dollars.

Early on I decided that I was going to lie to the press. The best approach to talking about my personal life was to lie.

I've made a lot of mistakes and I don't regret any of them. Sometimes that's the only way you learn.

If you feel you have a film that's valid, you stick your ass on the line.

The only people who ever called me a rebel were people who wanted me to do what they wanted.

When you are making the one you are doing, you think it is the greatest film going. And then you do another one and it is a great film.

Now, there is always a tremendous fear of science and progressing forward into areas of the unknown and it is a valid fear. Some of the genetic alterations of food are a little edgy.

We truly have an ancient part of the brain that was about survival when we were prey but we seem to have gone past prey. We eat everything and nothing eats us.

We're really all alone. We can't ever get inside another person's spirit, and see the world they do. So we are alone in that sense. The only way we have to communicate feelings is through words.