the harder part is the living in relationship, the living it out, the consistently trying to do what I call deep listening, listening to the needs around me, listening to what I'm — where we're being nudged and drawn, listening to people's stories, listening to the murmurs inside of me.

Roll up your sleeves and work as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in a lunatic asylum or a machine operator in a slaughterhouse. Drive a taxi for six months and you’ll have enough money to make a film. Walk on foot, learn languages and a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking — like great literature — must have experience of life at its foundation. Read Conrad or Hemingway and you can tell how much real life is in those books.

They become almost like your children. Next to your own flesh and blood, you get very close to them. Their joys are your joys, their sorrows are your sorrows and that goes on forever. It doesn't end when they leave your supervision. That's with you forever.

it's not profound regret. It's just a wiping up of tiny, little messes that you didn't recognize as a mess when they were going on

I knew what I had done wrong. I had followed the experts and put the money I had in television. The second time around I spent almost no money on television. The only money I spent on television, I spent on Ted Turner's station, late at night on something called Creature Feature and wrestling. Because those were things that I knew people looked at. But we spent most of our money organizing people door-to-door.

It was only with her help that I did everything. The tragedy was that after 40 years of marriage she died of cancer.

I had followed the experts and put the money I had in television.

[My father] used to say all the time, “You’re in a struggle, but if you get in a fight and lose your temper, you’ll lose the fight. So don’t get mad, get smart.”

Her lesson all the time was “To them to whom much has been given, of them will much be required.”

Everything I did, and I think everything Martin Luther King did, was because we allowed our lives to be in tune with what we felt to be a divine purpose. And it didn’t matter whether we lived or died. It didn’t matter how much money we made, or what we accomplished.