Laziness and procrastination.

Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing.

Not getting to the point.

My love of sugar.

Be true to yourself. Find your own voice and be true to that voice. Never take a bad idea, but never turn down a good idea. And, of course, have final cut. And be true to the ideas.

Intuition? They say intuition is sort of feeling and intellect going at the same time. It’s a knowingness. As I always say, it’s knowing when something isn’t quite correct and then knowing a way to make it correct. And intuition is, I always say, the number one tool for the artist, I think the number one tool for people in business, perhaps the number one tool for human beings. Knowing how to do something, how to make it feel correct for you.

It just, um, starts feeling correcter and correcter until it's done.

I don’t know if that is true. There have been 110 or more years of cinema, and it’s impossible for any one of us to make a film that can’t be compared to something that has come before. To me Blue Velvet is Blue Velvet and Rear Window is Rear Window. You could say that Sunset Boulevard or Rear Window has conjured an idea for me, but even though I love them or am inspired by them, life is a 24/7 movie. Ideas come out of that all the time. It’s hard to say it’s cinema that conjures ideas. It’s altogether.

The studios are superreluctant to give final cut. They have so much money riding on these things, so they want a committee to go and rule the roost.

To me, the greatest master that ever walked the earth. Maybe some could be as great, but none could be greater.