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.

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.