These seem to me so ambiguous so vague so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.

And why is our music called world music? I think people are being polite. What they want to say is that it's third world music. Like they use to call us under developed countries now it has changed to developing countries it's much more polite.

On the other hand what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons you understand but the ghosts.

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

But you know if you live an affluent lifestyle there are all types of trappings that are there that you have to be cognizant of and you've got to try and communicate freely and gain understanding about and then keep moving on because you know sometimes lifestyles are chosen for us as opposed to us choosing them.

In movies there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It's a quiet difficult undertaking requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.

All that running around in my underwear put money in my pockets. I can focus on working in interesting movies without having to worry about supporting myself.

American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class age gender culture.

Maybe when I stop making movies I'll understand my work better.

When we were doing 'Freaks and Geeks' I didn't quite understand how movies and TV worked and I would improvise even if the camera wasn't on me. I thought I was helping the other actors by keeping them on their toes but nobody appreciated it when I would trip them up. So I was improvising a little bit back then but not in a productive way.