James Gray

“It's hard to run away from who you are, and when your taste is formed is a very important thing.”

“I had written 'Two Lovers' before we started shooting 'We Own the Night.'”

“'Apocalypse Now' does not alienate us or deconstruct itself. In fact, it welcomes us in.”

“I think to be a movie critic is troubling from one major respect. If you are forced to watch ten movies a week, it's really only something you can do for a few years. After a while, it's a bit too much.”

“'Apocalypse Now' poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic.”

“All I can say is sometimes home gets burned into your occipital lobe, and it can't leave you, and there's always that longing.”

“I am an Ashkenazi Jew, and there are a whole host of genetic disorders that only Ashkenazi Jews have. I don't know if you know this, but 16 or 17 disorders that we carry the gene for.”

“There are very few movies in English about romantic obsession told with a seriousness of purpose.”

“I think storytelling is a thing of beauty, and also very difficult. It's a craft you have to continue to work at.”

“I've learned that you can never predict what will happen to a film. You can never predict if people will love it, if they'll hate it. It's an act of ego if you're hoping for everyone to love the film and tell you how great you are.”

“Melodrama and melodramatic are not the same thing, and often people make the mistake of confusing the two.”

“I have no athletic skills whatsoever. I'm just literally incompetent.”

“At Ellis Island, I mean, you didn't go there if you arrived in first class. It was only the poorest, the people in the worst shape.”

“Sean Penn has announced his retirement from acting about 72 times.”

“I'm just not willing to give up on myself. If I'm going to fail, then I want to fail to the limits of my talent.”

“I would love it if my films made a lot of money, and may I say that 'The Yards' is the only one that's lost money.”

“I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.”

“If everybody loves you, you must be doing something wrong. It means there's no button being pushed... The only way that everybody loves you is toward the end of your career.”

“I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me.”

“It's difficult because Manhattan is so fantastic, and it's 9 miles away, and all these cool rich people live there and have great lives, and you live in a semi-attached row house in Queens.”