People From California

"We would all say that deep down, all we want is to be happy. Yet we don’t have a realistic understanding of what happiness really is. Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure."

"We could search the whole world and never find another being more worthy of our love than ourselves."

"We must do away with any shred of denial, minimization, justification, or rationalization. To recover, we must completely and totally understand and accept the truth that addiction creates suffering."

"Difficult personalities are a mirror for the places where we get stuck in judgment, fear, and confusion."

"The cause of our suffering has always been our reaction to the thoughts, feelings, cravings, and circumstances of our lives. The cause of our addictions has always been the indulgence in the behaviors or substances."

"While we are in recovery we need to be able to strike a balance between not allowing our ego to do all the talking and not letting our low self-esteem to only present what is wrong with us."

"As we walk the path of Refuge Recovery, we gradually uncover a loving heart."

"If our definition of happiness is "experiencing that which is pleasurable," we are going to be disappointed a lot of the time."

"The next step in the process of liberation is to break this chain reaction of suffering whenever life is unpleasant and feeling content only when life is pleasurable."

"Forgiveness is not just a selfish pursuit of personal satisfaction or righteousness. It actually alleviates the amount of suffering in the world. As each one of us frees ourselves from clinging to resentments that cause suffering, we relieve our friends, family, and community of the burden of our unhappiness. This is not a philosophical proposal; it is a verifiable and practical truth. Through our suffering and lack of forgiveness, we tend to do all kinds of unskillful things that hurt others. We close ourselves off from love, for example, out of fear of further pains or betrayals. This alone—a lack of openness to the love shown to us—is a way that we cause harm to our loved ones. The closed heart lets no one in or out."

"Sitting still is a pain in the ass."

"Experience each moment as if it were the first sensation of its kind ever. Bring childlike interest and curiosity to your present-time experience."

"The most important thing to remember is that we must live in the present, and if in the present moment we are still holding on to old wounds and betrayals, it is in this moment that forgiveness is called for."

"The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one's own mind and heart."

"The truth is, going against the internal stream of ignorance is way more rebellious than trying to start some sort of cultural revolution."

"It's easy to hate and point out everything that is wrong with the world; it is the hardest and most important work in one's life to free oneself from the bonds of fear and attachment."

"I sought a different path than that of my parents. I totally rejected meditation and all the spiritual shit they built their lives on. Looking at the once idealistic hippie generation who had long since cut their hair, left the commune, and bought into the system, we saw that peace and love had failed to make any real changes in the world. In response, we felt love and despair and hopelessness, out of which came the punk rock movement. Seeking to rebel against our parents' pacifism and society's fascist system of oppression and capitalist-driven propaganda, we responded in our own way, different from those before us, creating a new revolution for a new generation. Painfully aware of corruption in the government and inconsistencies in the power dynamics in our homes, we rebelled against our families and society in one loud and fast roar of teen angst. Unwilling to accept the dictates of the system, we did whatever we could to rebel. We wanted freedom and were willing to fight for it."

"Spiritual revolutionaries must be committed not to what is easiest, but to what is most beneficial to themselves and the world."

"The greatest satisfaction comes not from chasing pleasure and avoiding pain, but from the radical acceptance of life as it is, without fighting and clinging to passing desires."

"Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure. True happiness exists as the spacious and compassionate heart's willingness to feel whatever is present."

"Everything is impermanent. Every physical and mental experience arises and passes. Everything in existence is endlessly arising out of causes and conditions. We all create suffering for ourselves through our resistance, through our desire to have things different than the way they are - that is, our clinging or aversion."

"The body breathes by itself. The mind thinks by itself. Awareness simply observes the process without getting lost in the content."

"If you did not suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are."

"You have to be taught to leave us alone. Leave us alone."

"It was a simple story, really. Yes, God had told us to get a ship, and repeatedly He had confirmed His guidance using all the ways we had learned for hearing His voice. He used the Wise Men Principle; He used Scriptures which He seemed to lift off the pages for us; He used provision of money and people, and that inner conviction -- but we had failed in the way we had carried out His guidance. We had subtly turned from the Giver to the gift."

"Disagreements don't cause disunity, a lack of forgiveness does."

"You know, I don't think I've ever listened to someone's commentary. Ever."

"He's just scary smart, sort of smarter than everyone else in the room. There's just a handful of these people who know absolutely everything about the process. They could do everyone's job brilliantly. Every aspect is under their control."

"Thank you to the stellar collection of photographers, designers, editors, musicians, costumers, painters, researchers, electricians and craftspeople who without whom I'd just be a bitter man with a lot of opinions"

"I thought it was so strange because I normally make these pitch-black studies of misanthropes or the occasional movie about serial killers, sowhat could the possibly see in this material for me."

"You can either look at your career as the things you're going to leave behind, and they have to be executed flawlessly and you have to know exactly what it is that you're doing. Or you can be realistic about the fact that you're going to learn as you practice what you do."

"Hollywood is great. I also think it's stupid and small-minded and shortsighted. I'm sure there are people who get into movies so they can get nice tables at restaurants."

"You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable."

"Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay."

"As much as people pretend 'I fit in, I understand, I get the rules,' there are always times spent away from that where you go, 'I thought I knew. It seemed so clear to me, and then...' That sense of loneliness, or the sense of not fitting in or being out of depth, is probably the most common denominator."

"For me, the scariest thing about a serial killer is that there's somebody who lives next door to you, running power tools late into the night, and you don't know he has a refrigerator full of penises."

"I want to make a movie that has enough impact that it's going to do what it needs to do. But I don't want to make a film that serial killers masturbate to."

"You can do something that walks a line, and invariably, whatever that line is, it will be crossed by people who don't know any better and want to ape the success."

"I don't have the Tom Hanks fans. When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people."

"I tend to over-intellectualize things, to come at them from a structural point."

"There are some movies I can watch over and over, never get sick of. I'll put one of those on and be puttering around the house. Then a certain scene will come on and I'll just have to go over and watch."

"Oh, yeah, I love DVD's. I don't have what you'd call an extensive collection, maybe a couple of hundred or so. But I have something on almost all the time."

"I always feel ill-prepared for commentaries and it had been so long I was afraid I'd forget everything that happened on the film. But having everybody come together for it was really great. It was like a high school reunion. We all reminisced and just had a great time."

"I do like movies that take a toll on the audience. I want to work the subconscious. I want to involve you in ways in which you might not necessarily want to get involved. I want to play off those things that you're expecting to get when the lights go down and the 20th Century Fox logo comes up. There's an audience expectation and I'm interested in how movies play with--and off--that expectation. That's what I'm interested in."

"I find it amoral if you're making a movie where the problem is solved with a guy standing in the back of pickup truck firing a machine at the bad guys. The morality of it is questionable because the repercussions of violence are incredibly far-reaching."

"Violence shouldn't be presented as drama. I think people looking for an easy way out often write scenes where characters come into violent conflict as opposed to looking for the true drama in the situation. That's a shortcoming of a lot of films and television shows. I think certain presentations of violence are not immoral, but amoral."

"The movie is not that violent. There are ideas in the movie that are scary, but the film isn't about violence, the glorification of violence or the embracing of violence. In the movie, violence is a metaphor for feeling. It's a film about the problems or requirements involved with being masculine in today's society."

"Film-making encompasses everything, from tricking people into investing in it, to putting on the show, to trying to distill down to moments in time, and ape reality but send this other message. It's got everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw, and I loved my electric football sets, and I painted little things and made sculptures and did matte painting and comic books and illustrated stuff, and took pictures, had a darkroom, loved to tape-record stuff. It's all of that. It's not having to grow up. It's four-dimensional chess, it's strategy, and it's being painfully honest, and unbelievably deceitful, and everything in between."

"You want to be able to provide something, and you're pissing down a fucking well. It will suck you dry and take everything you have and, like being a parent, you can pour as much love as you want, and your kid still says, "Just let me right out here, you don't have to take me all the way." You're working to make yourself obsolete. I'm not going to make Persona - my movies are fairly obvious in what the people want and what it is that's happening; it;s not that internalized. What's internalized is how you process the information from the singular, subjective point of view. And that becomes the subtext of it."

"We wanted a title sequence that started in the fear center of the brain. [When you hear] the sound of a gun being cocked that's in your mouth, the part of you brain that gets everything going, that realizes that you are fucked - we see all the thought processes, we see the synapses firing, we see the chemical electrical impulses that are the call to arms. And we wanted to sort of follow that out. Because the movie is about thought, it's about how this guy thinks. And it's from his point of view, solely. So I liked the idea of starting a movie from thought, from the beginning of the first fear impulse that went, Oh shit, I'm fucked, how did I get here?"