The cliche is that life is a mountain. You go up, reach the top and then go down.
I'm okay with the path that I'm on, but it's fascinating to think, 'I could've been a gay guy in Key West. I could be working at an insurance company in Lansing. But somehow, this is what's happening.'
All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.
You must know that in any moment a decision you make can change the course of your life forever, the very next person who you stand behind in line or sit next to on an aeroplane, the very next phone call you make or receive, the very next movie you see or book you read or page you turn could be the one single thing that causes the floodgates to open, and all of the things that you've been waiting for to fall into place.
It wasn't a conscious effort to have kids later. It was just the way life goes.
I'm a New Yorker, originally. I was raised in Jackson Heights. I went to P.S. 148 and then Newtown High School. If World War II didn't come, I'd still be there in school. World War II saved me.
It is said that history turns on small hinges. A human career, too, results from an accumulating series of decisions about large and small matters over a period of years. But the catch is that you can never know when a seemingly small decision may prove to be, from the vantage of later years, the big decision of your life.
It was never really my plan to become a filmmaker.
My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.
Now, I'm a dad, I'm an adult. I've been solo for 25 years; I've been in other people's groups but I'm solo [in a broader sense]. I stopped comparing myself to other people's maps when I was maybe 24, really. The trajectory that I've gone on is not one that I can compare with anybody else.
How one life turns out is not dependent on what people do to us or what they don't do for us.
Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down.
If you knew me before Myspace, you'd probably thought I'd have been a scholar teaching philosophy in a university my whole life. If you met me before college, you'd probably have thought I'd be a musician for my entire life.
There are moments that define a person's whole life. MOMENTS in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become hinge on a single decision.
My life has taken me down several different paths I never expected it to take me down. Not in a million years.
The small day-to-day decisions will determine the course of your lives.
It's strange, I think, the way our lives turn out. Moments of circumstance, when later combined with conscious decisions and actions and a boatload of hope, can eventually forge a future that seems predestined.
What wouldn't have happened to me if I hadn't ended up in Hartford, Connecticut.
I don't want to be married. I don't know - it sounds crazy, but in my mind, it's all connected. You get married, you have kids, you grow old, then you die. Somehow, it seems to me, if you didn't get married, you wouldn't die.
The whole trend and quality of anyone's life is determined in the long run by the choices that are made.
It was something... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.
It is not so much the major events as the small day-to-day decisions that map the course of our living. . . Our lives are, in reality, the sum total of our seemingly unimportant decisions and of our capacity to live by those decisions.
Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do.
I had always been a fatalist about my career. What was to be was to be.
It's hard to define somebody by one movie. I mean, unfortunately, my entire life was basically made by Billy Elliot. It was kind of created by that one catalytic moment.
