I would do a documentary about Jay-Z. Yes, I would.

I think it's in our nature to try to get beyond that next horizon. I think that when we, as a species, are scratching that itch, we're actually following an evolutionary compulsion that is wired into us. I think good things come of it.

When you're young and you're striving, it's all uphill, and it's easier to climb. Then, when you get and look around, you sort of say, 'Wow, the altitude's kinda thin up here!'

I've worked with Bette Davis, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda. Here's the thing they all have in common: They all, even in their 70s, worked a little harder than everyone else.

The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.

Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.

On this ancient and miraculous world, where such beautiful natural and living things have evolved, something has gone wrong when life itself is used as a manufacturing process.

It's easier to identify with loss than love, because we have had so much more experience of it.

I'm told we movie critics praise movies that are long and boring.

If there's anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it's an incompetent stupid action comedy. It's not so bad it's good. It's so bad it's nothing else but bad.

No movie has ever been able to provide a catharsis for the Holocaust, and I suspect none will ever be able to provide one for 9/11. Such subjects overwhelm art.

We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.

Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.

If your religion doesn't respect the rights of other religions, it is lacking something.

One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film's defining moments.

I do suspect my star ratings average too high. But, of course, star ratings are ridiculous. I'm stuck with them.

When I am writing, my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.

I like smart movies about smart people, and enjoy it when most of the facts are on the table and we can contemplate them together.

Life is made up of challenges that cannot be solved but only accepted.

It does seem true that a lot of people will do anything, however humiliating, for fame.

Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.

Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.

Time is what the depressed and panicked lack.

Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.