Growing up, my mother was a very strong woman who was not very big, about 5'1'', but boy, you grabbed a tiger by the tail if you messed with her. I know grown men that messed with her, and through her wit and intelligence and her no-quit, she never lost a fight. That's very influential on me when I'm telling stories. I love exploring that.

I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.

The movies I make - the goal isn't a mass audience. They're not expensive films. So the attempt is to reach a much more limited audience - one would say an audience that enjoys films that challenge them emotionally and intellectually.

Part of our job as storytellers is to show people pockets of the world that they don't know. The more we understand, the more we don't judge.

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

I never thought about success. I always thought about doing the job at hand. My goal was getting through the show that night.

Three of the brightest baseball pitchers of their times staged comebacks without much success - David Cone, Jim Bouton and Jim Palmer - but there was room to admire their quixotic gesture.

Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.