There is a criterion by which you can judge whether the thoughts you are thinking and the things you are doing are right for you. The criterion is: Have they brought you inner peace?

Writing is good thinking is better. Cleverness is good patience is better.

I like figuring out where I need to be mentally so that I'm not thinking about the camera and that it's second nature. I want to get to a place where I can exist within the confines of what you can do with filmmaking and not have to think about it.

I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.

Man is but a reed the most feeble thing in nature but he is a thinking reed.

My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

I think movies are good for getting into dream states or exploring weird alternate states of thinking.

I don't make movies thinking: 'Oh this is going to be a huge box-office hit.'

I think being self-referential is really narcissistic. Who's to say anybody's even thinking of you that much? But some of these movies that I've done people still recite lines to me even 20 years later.

Sexiness particularly in movies is the chess game in the 'Thomas Crown Affair'. It's it's I don't know but Faye Dunaway comes up a lot in that thinking. It's the subtlety of sexiness. The moment you try to be sexy then it's not.

Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking 'I'm a bad guy.' They think they're the right guy.

I'm thinking to myself I just love doing the art it takes me a morning to do.

It's disrespectful to tell the French in the morning that you're going to reduce the debt in the evening that you're not going to make any savings and the next morning after thinking about it that you're going to spend more.

Directing is: you're overwhelmed the whole time. Your mind never stops. If you care about it. You wake up in the morning and you begin thinking about it and then you go to sleep at night and you're still thinking about it.

If I can bring joy into the world if I can get people to stop thinking about their pain for a moment or the fact the tomorrow morning they're going to get up and tell their boss off... then I'll be successful.

It's very important to write things down instantly or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.

I don't go to Mass every day. But I go to church every day. Just sitting there thinking - it's a great way to start the morning you know? You feel so good coming out and your approach to everything is suddenly really clear.

I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about it all the time - when I woke up in the morning when I went to sleep at night - and that went on for eight years.

My brain is so anxiety-prone like a pinball machine. If I don't get up in the morning and focus my thinking my breathing and my being for about 12 minutes I'm just a screwball all day long.

You lie awake at 3 in the morning thinking of story ideas. You're online at 8 a.m. on a Sunday or midnight on a Wednesday. It's a job that you never push aside.

And if small businesspeople say they made it on their own all they are saying is that nobody else worked seven days a week in their place. Nobody showed up in their place to open the door at five in the morning. Nobody did their thinking and worrying and sweating for them.

Money isn't important but you have to have enough so you don't have to think about it. Thinking about money is a drag.