Personal Influences

Paul Thomas Anderson

"I don't get a sense of American pride. I just get a sense that everyone is here, battling the same thing - that around the world everybody's after the same thing, just some minor piece of happiness each day. "

"I'll rebel against powers and principalities, all the time. Always, I will."

Alfred Hitchcock

"Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms."

"In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director."

Albert Einstein

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"The important thing is not to stop questioning.  Curiosity has its own reasoning for existing."

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school."

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty."

Jean-Paul Sartre

"Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience."

"Hell is other people"

"She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist."

Soren Kierkegaard

"Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward."

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays."

"Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer."

Bill Maher

"Men are only as loyal as their options."

"Suicide is man's way of telling God, "You can't fire me - I quit."

"The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs."

"We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think religion stops people from thinking. I think it justified crazies."

Kurt Cobain

"Rather be dead than cool."

"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not."

"Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are."