I grew up in a little town in east Texas where it was really not on the table to question certain things like whether you should eat meat or not.

I don't want to be nostalgic for some kind of laid-back Austin where nothing was happening.

You're always just trying to make your film, tell the story you're trying to tell - best you can, you know.

I was dating girls who were actresses, and that was fun, so I took a playwriting class. But that was short-lived. That was one year. Around that time, I was seeing movies that were making me think in terms of images.

Artists are great. They jump in.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

I look up and go, 'I'm living in the world I visualized a long time ago.' From making movies, to the Film Society, to just being in a film world. It's a life that I wanted to inhabit. I think everyone has the opportunity to do that in this world - it's just, are you gonna work for it, and how much does it mean to you?

I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.

A college athlete is going to be competitive. You don't get to that level if you're not.

I played baseball in high school, and in some parallel universe, if I had not gone into filmmaking, I may have been the coach cursing at the kids.

It was always kind of sad when your favorite punk rockers, like Jello Biafra or someone, would say they hate something you like. It was, 'Oh, I thought we were on the same page.'

The truth will only be told over a career.

Some films really do take years to get going, but I'd say that most of the films I want to do are slightly smaller projects. Some could be sketches. They're not all oil paintings.

I think they should make it a felony to criticise a film product. Particularly my film product. It's anti-American.

Well, you have to keep your faith in the fact that there are a lot of intelligent people who are actively looking for something interesting, people who have been disappointed so many times.

I think people forget how radical the narrative of 'Slacker' is. There's no story, you know? We could go from one character to the next to the next and never return.

I always say I'll never make a film in Austin in summer, but I always end up here.

The arts were like, there's no opponent. It's just yourself. I'm not saying they don't make the arts a competition with awards and all that, but that's outside the work itself.

If you want to just make a good movie, if you don't enjoy every step and become a master of each little moment, then you shouldn't be doing it.

When I saw 'subUrbia' on stage, I started having those feelings inside me. I saw it as a film, and I felt I knew the characters, or I was the characters. It really dredged up all this stuff in me that never went away.

Something about Texas I'm not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.

Whatever story you want to tell, tell it at the right size.

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

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.