Never be a food snob. Learn from everyone you meet - the fish guy at your market the lady at the local diner farmers cheese makers. Ask questions try everything and eat up!

There's so many things I want to do. I want to work with great filmmakers great actors great scripts. And there's no reason for me to do anything short of that because I'm 24 I don't have a family I don't need to make tons of money and I'm not dying to get famous.

Few would argue that Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous atheist especially now that his friend and rival for the title Christopher Hitchens has now gone to meet his Maker.

Yeah I like to be the maker of the art. And I like and want the money. But I don't really dig being famous.

My mom always said I was the peacemaker in the family. My older brother Eric was the leader the creative one. I was just his puppet.

When I did 'E.T. ' it sort of solidified the only family I know are these film crews. These gypsies. These filmmakers. That was the solidification and the clicking revelations of 'This is what I want to do with my life and this is where I'm going to survive.'

Women are in my view natural peacemakers. As givers and nurturers of life through their focus on human relationships and their engagement with the demanding work of raising children and protecting family life they develop a deep sense of empathy that cuts through to underlying human realities.

In Barack Obama Democrats have put forth a man of strong religious faith who is comfortable connecting his spiritual life to his public role as a policymaker.

Louis Malle was the best filmmaker I've ever worked with. He was such an artist. He was dealing with the theme of innocence and experience.

You ask any moviemaker what their favorite movie experience was and they'll say it was one of the first ones where everyone had to pitch in and do everything together and you had to struggle.

Working with HBO was an opportunity to experience creative freedom and 'long-form development' that filmmakers didn't have a chance to do before the emergence of shows like 'The Sopranos.'

I said on the equality side of it that it is essential to a woman's equality with man that she be the decision-maker that her choice be controlling.

What you have in most education software is that they're catering to the decision-maker who makes the budget allocations and that decision-maker has a lot of check boxes. Does it do this? Check. Does it do that? Check. They could care less about the end user experience.

Capitalism would have never let me be a filmmaker living in Flint Michigan with a high school education. I was going to have to make that happen myself.

I was very inspired by Les Blank's film 'Burden of Dreams.' I think what's unique about his film and the two I've made is that they're close examinations of filmmakers and how their own emotional experiences reflect in the material they're rendering and vice versa - how that material sometimes colors their own lives.

You know Willie Wonka said it best: we are the makers of dreams the dreamers of dreams.

The point is that I don't design stuff for myself. I'm a toolmaker. I design things that other people want to use.

A lot of young filmmakers bring their movies to my dad because he always gives lots of good editing ideas and notes. He'd be a good film professor.

I come from an ordinary family - my dad is a carpenter a roof-maker - and we've always loved racing together.

It's up to the courage of the filmmakers to make art in cinema not just business. John was rejected by studios he borrowed money and did movies with his own money. You're either courageous or not. You have to find a way.

I already have legitimacy as a filmmaker and now I'm trying to do stuff that's just fun. Until I find a cool tangible subject again that I want to tackle.

You know my dad wasn't a photographer or filmmaker by profession but on Sundays he would take pictures of me and my family or his pals horseback riding and it was a means of communication and affection a means of not being so dysfunctional with each other.

Every song has a composer every book has an author every car has a maker every painting has a painter and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.

After I left the White House I kept a foothold in the business of American politics as a talk-show host analyst commentator speechmaker and occasional writer. I was no longer a practitioner but I was still a partisan a Democrat a blue-stater through and through.