That's important too. Because everyone has to have an outlet. Otherwise you can get so involved in your job, or any one thing, that you're not a very well-balanced person, and you're not happy either, normally. I think it's very important to take up an avocation. Sports — that was mine.

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.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

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.

And so, I went to Texas Tech El Paso. I could literally throw a stone out of my window and hit someone in Juárez, Mexico. And yet, it was the most beautiful place to practice, because in that county hospital we saw everything in young people, untreated; it felt very meaningful, but my evenings were mine to write and to develop my voice, and my weekends were mine. And I eventually got hired to Stanford in a roundabout way, largely because of that.

He says, "Dad, I'm not necessarily looking for that. I just want to make enough money in doing this thing I love to do." I mean, what more could I say about that? So I said, "Go for it.