I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up because you're filling in spaces.

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.

Lord of the Rings was my first experience making movies and at the time I had no ideas how movies were done. I thought that's the way they're done so in a way I had nothing to compare it to.

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.

When I was 12 years old someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.

There's nothing wrong with acknowledging the panoply of life's rich experience.

Well I think the main message is there is more to your story. There is more than what happens between the crib and the grave and that is what I am really trying to speak to this idea that all of life is this life and that there is nothing more than what we see and experience right here on this earth.

It is important to expect nothing to take every experience including the negative ones as merely steps on the path and to proceed.

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.