The worst thing is that you used to be able to show interesting films on campuses. Those places are all gone.

No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it's easier to get on the subway and not be accosted.

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

Well, you have to keep your faith in the fact that there are a lot of intelligent people who are actively looking for something interesting, people who have been disappointed so many times.

I did The Newton Boys and during the whole process of making the film, I may have spent a week in Los Angeles.

I always sensed instinctively from the earliest age that I was being lied to.

Hollywood has a way of sucking the world's talent to it.

I do find myself at the moment, due to the success of School of Rock, to be on people's radar a little.

I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.

I worked offshore as an oil worker for a couple of years.

I want to make a film about a factory worker.

I think there are more films being made, but there are probably less outlets for them and distributors.

I've never been a guy who had more than a toe in Hollywood anyway, so my toe is more easily lopped off than most.

The worst thing is that you used to be able to show interesting films on campuses. Those places are all gone.

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

I think I got really lucky with Slacker. That was a film that probably shouldn't have been seen.

I think you get in trouble if you make experimental big studio films.

Yes, but Hollywood is the strangest place in that they'll torpedo their own film to prove an emotional point.

Everyone is encouraged to see their lives, the world through the eyes of the rich.

Something about Texas I'm not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.

Before Sunrise did very well internationally. It made as much in Italy and Korea as it did here.

Whatever story you want to tell, tell it at the right size.

I lost a year or two in there, trying to get films financed that I didn't know would never get financing.

It's disappointing to see films become pure entertainment, so that it's not an art form.

The truth will only be told over a career.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

At some point youre no longer growing up youre aging. But no one can pinpoint that moment exactly.

Filmmakers are going to make films just like painters are going to paint.

As you get older, you want less from the world; you just want to experience it. Any barriers to feeling emotions get dismantled. And ordinary things become beautifully poetic.

Cartels have spread and will spread as long as the world lacks an effective mechanism by which balanced expansion may be achieved without a resulting disruption of prices.

Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.

Any finish at Le Mans is great but every time I go to Le Mans my mission is to win.

Here's what happens - you create something in the moment that you feel will be good, and then... people's reactions to it or people referencing it years later, it's a compliment.

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, 'What do you think?' I hope that you think well of it, obviously.

Nashville is wicked. It's like a proper music community, but it's also quintessentially American. You bump into people there with cowboy hats that spit in jars and call you 'boy.' I just love that.

I think there's a point at which money, influence, and power become so blinding that people believe they control the world.

Christians are supposed to be the most forgiving people on the face of the Earth.

I loved Michael Jackson and Madonna. I styled my hair like Whitney Houston.

By the age of 18, I was very fat. My dad would say there's a Spall fat gene. But I was fat because I ate loads. I used to go and buy six or seven chocolate bars and eat my way through them.

Even a beautiful piece of work can be overshadowed, destroyed, by something else.

When I auditioned for 'Animal House,' I had only done some plays at a local dinner theater in Virginia.

Excelsior, higher and higher, but only step by step.

The two Virtues of Equanimity and Compassion become more available to the person whose ego shell has been smashed either by great suffering or by great love or by both.

denial was a weapon it killed truth numbed the mind and I was a junkie.

Having worked with so many of the geniuses, I'd learned so much. It's the best sort of photography school, to work with people like Penn or Avedon or Meisel.

If you stay true to your principles you have confidence conviction purpose values in other words you have a future.

For a long time I tried to manage an honesty and openness about my personal life because I'm human and I'm normal - well, semi-normal.

They do put my films on TV from time to time. I don't go out of my way to watch them. But I'm now made to tape them for my daughter so that when she's old enough she can say, 'Hey, that's Daddy.'

Nobody in show business can possibly get away with making fun of their boss.