Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.

I don't want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He's a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way even though it might be temporarily unpopular is the best approach.

If I am a cup maker I'm interested in making the best cup I possibly can. My effort goes into that cup not what people think about it.

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.

The world is a crazy beautiful ugly complicated place and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away that's when this stuff comes.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art because to us it is false and visionary was to the makers of it true and existent.

My favorite laser disk ever was the laser disk for The Graduate which had a commentary track that wasn't even the filmmakers it was a professor some film criticism guy who just happen to be this amazing commentator who went off into the whole theory of comedy.