There's nothing like a family crisis, especially a divorce, to force a person to re-evaluate his life.
My main aim is getting set up so that when I do quit, I can step away and re-evaluate what I want to do in life. Do I want to get to 50 years old and come back? Or will I just want to go home and be fishing, hunting and working around the house?
When my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1991, I asked him if he had any regrets, and he said no. I was a burnt-out litigation solicitor in my thirties, hating my life, and his cancer made me re-evaluate it all.
If your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.
I wanted to re-examine stories people think they know without the rose-colored glasses of Hollywood and let the audience decide for themselves if people like Wyatt Earp were sinners or victims of life circumstances.
'Sizwa Banzi' is the life of the black man. We look at it, laugh at it, re-examine it, but we do not change it.
I did keep detailed journals from about fifth grade on, and every so often as I was growing up, I would re-read them and reflect on the previous years of my life.
I've always been interested in the Greek tragedies. A few years back, I re-read a translation of the 'The Oresteia,' and that stayed with me, and slowly this idea of using some of those old legends and plays to tell a new story about modern urban life began to form.
I'm making movies about people as flawed as myself and the viewers. So if you just have a reptilian brain and live your life simply by reacting to things, my movies aren't going to work for you.
'Faith and Will' is aimed at the same readership as 'The Artist's Way.' The book is for spiritual seekers in all walks of life.
Competitive skills are desperately needed by poor children in America, and realistic recognition of the economic roles that they may someday have an opportunity to fill is obviously important, too. But there is more to life, and there ought to be much more to childhood, than readiness for economic functions.
No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.
Walking in the mountains helps me unwind, but it also reminds me in a painful way that the real beauty in life is nature and animals, and that the human race, in all its arrogance, is intent on destroying it.
I always say you can never be extravagant with beauty. Beauty is God made real. Beauty is life.
There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike.
I can't apply $3 billion in capital to the tech industry. It wouldn't work. But in infrastructure, education, I can make a real difference. I can change someone's life, for the better, permanently. If I can improve a kid's education, I can increase their salary later on and for decades.
My biggest bits of advice are, write as much as you can, finish what you start, get a thick skin, don't take crap from anyone, but also live your life and have fun. The stereotype of a writer holed up alone all day is really unhelpful. You can't write real people and real emotion if you don't let yourself experience them.
The most terrifying thing for most everybody in the whole Western World is to take responsibility for your own life and to experience real freedom.
I'm not going to beat this life. It's gonna get me in the end. So accepting that is a real freedom and finding a joy in working that I haven't allowed myself before.
The making of friends who are real friends, is the best token we have of a man's success in life.
