Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

Music and language are a vital element. We as actors and directors offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

Directing is a more pragmatic experience where you have to deal with the restrictions of time and money that force you to make certain decisions you don't have to make when you're writing.

There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.

Making movies is a very different experience in a lot of ways. It's difficult when you're used to owning the copyright and having a landlord's possessory rights - I rent my plays to the companies that do them and if I'm upset I can pull the play. But the only two directors I've worked with are pretty great.

I think newspapers shouldn't try to compete directly with the Web and should do what they can do better which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper.

I like directors who have worked as actors. They know the experience.

Some of us are interested in directors but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.

I'd done table reads for my own screenplays and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts.