For a lot of us, awareness is merely realizing the extent to which we've been lied to all our lives. You start educating yourself. You become motivated; you follow your muse where it takes you. And you see the world in a different way. You start making decisions based on what you feel is right.

Every stage of filmmaking's important while you're doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it's how to tell the story.

As I get older, my emotions are closer to the surface.

A certain kind of film is a big theatrical film and a certain kind of film isn't. It doesn't bother me so much that you can pick your format.

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

It's just too late to ban all guns. There are 300 million. We should've done that after the Civil War - that's when we should've taken away guns and defined what militias were. But we didn't do it then, and we can't now.

I wrote a script - a script about a guy working on the automobile assembly line; I never could get money for that. I did a pilot about minimum wage workers for HBO that didn't get picked up; they thought it was depressing, even though it was a comedy.

You learn from everybody.

I loved 'Goodbye to Language.'

I try to avoid bad experiences.

I'm not enough of one of those public personalities who feels as though he's been one-dimensionalized. I don't feel that strongly enough.

I've made movies where people say it's their favourite, but they don't take it seriously because it just didn't seem to break through commercially.

I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.

The best thing for your psyche as you try to accomplish anything, really, is to just concentrate on all the little things. And not just as a means to an end, but truly enjoy them.

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

The natural phenomenon of the universe is so mind-blowing, but you have to know about it. You have to be curious. You've got to find it on your own. If you're lucky, you do.

I don't see the arts as competitive at all. It was a better angel of my nature. Sports is zero-sum: winner, loser, demonstrable.

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.

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.

We emphasize negativity and violence in the media because that's what grabs everybody's attention, but in the real world, it's mostly people being very cooperative and caring and connected and kind. That's the norm of human experience. And yet, what gets our attention is the very opposite.

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

I'm kind of an old theater guy, so I'm sort of attuned to it. Like, when I go to New York, I go to plays.

You don't really grow up until you quit playing sports.

I remember daydreaming out in the outfield: I wish I had more time. I want to read 'The Brothers Karamazov.'

I'd like to see people get sued if they wrote a bad review of my movie. If you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all.

I've always been interested in the industrialization of our food; it's been an issue for me from an environmental and animal rights and human health perspective.

I always had that long-term vision. Even getting going with cinema, knowing it was such a long road to be able to make films, but I always had a long term. Whenever I was starting out, I had that patience.

The '70s kind of sucked.

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

Took me a long time to know I was a nobody from nowhere.

I've done my part to 'ruin' Austin.

I'm the kid who wanted to grow up and be Bugs Bunny. I was very, very disappointed when I realized I couldn't grow up and be a cartoon character.

The people you live with at college, those first roommates often are people you're still friends with the rest of your life.

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.

My dad's chill. He's the guy who, you wreck the car, he says, 'Well, nobody was hurt. It's just some metal.'

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.

Every day's a hustle.

Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There's a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.

Trump has a lot less than he says he does.

Ulrik Ottinger was the most real and experimental of all the German New Wave directors. She was probably the most out-there, too. She's a fascinating artist in that world.

No one believes this, but when I'm working, it's the same, whether I'm working on 'Bad News Bears,' 'Before Sunset,' 'A Scanner Darkly,' or 'Fast Food Nation.' I'm the same person, trying to make it work.

I really do remember everything. I see people I haven't seen in 20 years, and I can talk with them about what we talked about outside the high school.

I like films that just put you in someone's world. It can be very subversive. Hitchcock would put you in the mind of a psychopath, and you'd care about them.

I have an uncomfortable groove, 'cause I have a lot of different kinds of stories to tell.

I realized a long time ago that, even as a kid, it's all about the choices you make, the things you pursue. In the end, you're a sum of your choices.

I guess I was just always one of those guys who asked those fundamental questions: 'Who am I? What's this for? Why? What does this mean? Is this real?' All these pretty basic questions. I like making movies about people who are self-conscious in that way, and are trying to feel their way through the world.

As a little kid, you go where your parents drag you. You have no agency, no dominion.

I remember when I made 'A Scanner Darkly,' going, 'I hope people see it in theater - but I think it's going to be seen in someone's room at two in the morning.' It's that kind of movie. And I would have loved if it had been available on multiple formats at the moment it opened.

The pop culture tends to go to the lowest denominator, so cinema is in a weird place, due to its mass nature. It's diluted down to very little: simple stories and simple politics.

To jump from the indie ranks to play with the big dogs, there's a gate you have to pass through.