It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish.  I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.

When you’re working and you make mistakes, particularly when you’re young, you make discoveries because you do things that are inappropriate and wrongheaded, but within the wrongheadedness you find an unexpected way to go. These things are truly the breakthroughs.

We have failed seven times up at bat, and we strike out, and I think, "How can I learn from that failure? What went wrong? What could I have done differently?" You have to take it apart to understand your failures. Failures teach you much more than your successes. Sometimes it is better just to pause on a setback, on a failure, on a screw-up, and say, "What did I learn from this?" You learn how to do it better and you recommit yourself.

The Godfather was a very unappreciated movie when we were making it. They were very unhappy with it. They didn't like the cast. They didn't like the way I was shooting it. I was always on the verge of getting fired. So it was an extremely nightmarish experience. I had two little kids, and the third one was born during that. We lived in a little apartment, and I was basically frightened that they didn't like it. They had as much as said that, so when it was all over I wasn't at all confident that it was going to be successful, and that I'd ever get another job.

Many people talk about a willingness to have failures. I hate failures. I don't think you should strike to make failures. I think it's OK to make mistakes – but by the time they become real failures, you probably should have discovered them much earlier.