The best thing that I got was rehearsing with my father. It was always about the process of figuring things out, and trying something new, and having….

Do you know what fear stands for? False Evidence Appearing Real..

As a producer, you have an opportunity to see the whole and bring people together..

I love storytelling, you know, beyond anything. I love a great story beyond a great performance. Storytelling is about what we all do together and ho….

I think it's more, at least at the time, a sense of abstraction. My mind doesn't really work in a way where there's a definitive sense of something. ….

You can’t just lump things into two categories. Things aren’t that simple..

'Brokeback Mountain' takes all your conceptions of America, and the Western, and cowboys, and sexuality, and love, and it stirs them all up..

As Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor. My sister [Maggie Gyllenhaal] came up to me recently after s….

I remember Chris Cooper saying to me - I was doing October Sky with him - and he said, "You know, you're just yelling at me." He's like, "You're just….

I think that we all have within us the potential for almost anything. If we play close attention to our lives, then we can get at it somehow..

When I walk into a screening, I'm nervous in a different way than I am as an actor. But the response is ultimately I know how I feel about it and tha….

I'm a harsh critic, you know? I am..

I started to realize I love study, I love the study of human behavior..

Do I take care of my body and take conditioning seriously? Yes..

Ang [Lee] gave us a lot of books about cowboys who had been gay or stories about it and all that stuff. And I just talked to a lot of my friends - wh….

As much as I am one for real human interaction, I also want to make a show that's entertaining and that people want to see..

When you have the opportunity to choose projects, inevitably you start being moved towards the things that you're moved by, right? And that changes o….

I always find you go back to an animal; it will always show you the sort of primal aspects of behavior. You always know how to respond if you choose ….

I'm a very political person, and I make political choices in my movies..

I understand the opposite side of the camera. I have a profound respect for that. I have worked with people who, when you hit that mark, are doing 50….

I think also what's interesting is that Maggie [Gyllenhaal] knows how much the choices that I make reflect what's going on in my life. Admittedly, pr….