“I don't want to imitate life in movies I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it's to show one emotion.”

“We didn't care if we were well-liked as long as the movies were good. We served the movie - that was our master at Miramax. In our second incarnation, the movie is still the master but we're getting the same results in more subtle ways.”

“You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.”

“I'm glad movies aren't going to please everybody, they can't. But what they have to be is recognisable. I don't equate myself with a master painter, but I think you can recognise my films.”

“I was at the end of the studio system so when I walked into movies, I had a magnificent suite in which I had a living room and a kitchen and a complete makeup room. I had everything just for me. With the independents, you're kind of roughing it, literally.”

“You have to read scripts and audition and develop relationships. It takes a long time to develop a body of work but over the last 25 years I guess I've done that many movies. In hindsight it may seem effortless, but there's a lot of work that goes into it.”

“The irony is that you can't use real rain to make movies.”

“Making movies was more a reaction to not being chosen for sports. Other kids were out there playing at whatever I was off making something blow up and filming it, or making a mould of my sister's head using alginating plaster.”

“I'm always happy when I hear about people selling records or selling books or selling movies. It makes me proud of them.”

“It's too expensive, that's the thing nobody wants to talk about. It is too expensive to make movies. That's not true, it is too expensive to market movies. Making movies is not.”

“Movies are movies, television is television.”

“I've done many different movies in many different contexts.”

“I'm very particular about the kind of music that I record and sing, and it would be the same way about the kind of movies that I would do.”

“People feel the worst film I made was 'Jack.' But to this day, when I get checks from old movies I've made, 'Jack' is one of the biggest ones. No one knows that. If people hate the movie, they hate the movie. I just wanted to work with Robin Williams.”

“If you really want to be competitive in today's market you have to be in movies that make money.”

“I hate movies that tell people what to think. I'm proud that Democrats thought 'Thank You For Smoking' was their film and Republicans thought it was theirs. I'm proud that pro-choice people thought 'Juno' was their film and pro-life people thought it was theirs.”

“I don't know why, but I've always been a sucker for roller coasters in movies.”

“I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept, so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge.”

“By the way, movies are like sporting events in that you're as good as the movie you're in. You can sit in a room for 20 years and go do a movie and you can just kill in it and you move to the head of the line again. By the same token, you can do five movies a year and if they're dreck, it's nothing.”

“There's an absolute prejudice that good movies are dramas and comedies are more dismissable. But I couldn't disagree more.”

“I love all the old classic Disney movies. 'Pinocchio.' There are obviously tons of them that anybody growing up on that stuff takes with them their whole lives, and I'm an admirer of a lot of classic animation and fairy tales. I grew up on a book of Grimm's fairy tales that I kind of wore out again and again. That's all stuff that lingers with you.”