Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture including TV magazines movies and video games.

You're creating new things in movies and people are going to steal them.

You go back to those films of the '40s and '50s and hear the dialogue the way the people played off each other - the wordplay. I think we've really lost that in movies.

I think being self-referential is really narcissistic. Who's to say anybody's even thinking of you that much? But some of these movies that I've done people still recite lines to me even 20 years later.

It seems to me that one thing people do over and over again is try to figure out how to get married stay married fall in love how to rekindle all this stuff. It seems to me to be a pretty eternal theme so I don't know if you can get typecast from making movies about men relating to women. It seems to be what is going on on the planet a lot.

I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge.

I wouldn't like to be in movies. Movie people are strange. They live a different life than musicians do.

It's like why people read scary books or go see scary movies. Because it creates a distance. They're scared but they're not going to get hurt.

I'm not mad about movies there are too many people involved in the making of them and they lack a definitive creative focus.

People feel the worst film I made was 'Jack.' But to this day when I get checks from old movies I've made 'Jack' is one of the biggest ones. No one knows that. If people hate the movie they hate the movie. I just wanted to work with Robin Williams.

People don't have these tidy little redemption arcs in reality the way they do in movies.

Movies such as 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' in 1939 to 'Dave' in 1993 portray Washington leaders as the ultimate Everymen - decent people just like you and me only thrust onto greatness.

People need to start to think about the messages that they send in the movies.

I do love the films I've done in the past. I work hard in my movies and my friends work hard and we're trying to make people laugh and I'm very proud of that.

What people adore about superhero movies is the signal quality of the Christopher Nolan films - their complete lack of irony when it comes to the portrayal of heroism and the need for heroes to confront evil.

Now on Friday nights if I want to go hang out with friends I go hang out with friends. If I want to stay in and be in the hot tub and have people over to watch movies I do that.

And what I like about it is it makes me happy and I think it makes a lot of people happy to go to the movies and to not think about the problems of the day or the problems of tomorrow or the yesterday and just go on for the ride and have the fun of losing oneself in a fantasy.

They say I can open movies and that's nice in that it puts into people's minds that women can do it. It's not just Kevin Costner not just Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not just the guys.

If people are constantly reading about you and you're overexposed they've got no reason to go see your movies. Also it's not pleasant or nice to have your privacy invaded.

I knew that there were black people in Africa of course unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'

I have a very busy life and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies.

I think a lot of people do big movies not because they are talented artists but because they can function in the circumstances.

I don't want to criticize any other designers but I have to say that many of the people involved in this industry - directors and producers - are trying to make their games more like movies. They are longing to make movies rather than making videogames.

You know those movies where the people in the audience are screaming 'Don't go in that door!' because you know the killer is there? Well it is the same thing with this debt. We know how this ends.