I'm anything but confident.

There's nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you're meant to do. It's like falling in love.

Comedy is brutal. It's powerful, though.

I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.

Limitations are inspiring: they lead to thinking, so I don’t mind them.

I never understand when people say, ‘Do you do comedy or tragedy?’ I don’t think they’re very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn’t a great play in the world that doesn’t have funny parts to it – as ‘Salesman’ does, as ‘King Lear’ does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don’t.

I came to love silence, because it’s so rare, and it’s now my favorite aural condition.

That seems to me the greatest American danger we’re all in, that we’ll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.

It’s not a filmmaker’s job to explain his technique but to tell his story the best way he can.