Sam Quotes

I think we're inevitably going to be depressed when we focus the major part of our energy and attention on something that doesn't give us meaning, only material things.

To sustain love, a man and a woman must continually be marrying and divorcing, moving with, against, away from, and beyond each other, saying 'yes' and 'no'.

If we don't preserve forest habitat for spotted owls, then soon we won't have trees to refresh the air we breathe. And we're realizing that this applies to social ecology, as well.

I think there are families that are very kind and supportive of people's ability to change. People who come from such families may go through life without dipping into the dark night.

I think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people find their way through them is a very important thing. It's a theme that goes through all of my work.

Throughout my life, I've had different metaphors for freedom. At one time, it was skin diving. In the ocean you feel weightless; you escape from gravity.

Everything can be satirized.

If I've learned one thing, it's 'don't tell the truth.' Lies keep you together.

I'm responsible. I even did a commercial for MTV saying how I was going to register to vote. And I still haven't.

I don't deny my life-style is occasionally pretty wild.

Jim Bakker. He's lost everything, he's ruined. And the worst thing of all he still has to wake up to her!

I've learned my feelings and thoughts are secondary to what needs to get done - that what matters is the next right action.

How wise are Thy commandments O Lord. Each one of them applies to somebody or other I know.

The Puritans came to America to worship in their way and to force everybody else to do the same thing.

Any kid who has two parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn't poor.

When I came home and showed my mother my report card with a mark of 98 in arithmetic, she wanted to know who had gotten the other two points.

It would be useless to bomb Washington. If you destroy one building, they already have two other buildings completely staffed with people doing exactly the same thing.

The American success formula is first to get a home of your own, then to get a car of your own so you don't have to stay in that home of your own.

At the U.N., any nation that fights back is censored as an "aggressor."

The beauty of America is that the average person always thinks she is above average.

Shudder, in fact, is not quite the word for the feeling. Feeling is not quite the word for the feeling. How's bathing at knifepoint in the phlegm of the dead? Is that a feeling?

Stuff me in a tutu and let's screen experimental videos all day.

Everything's weird if you stare at it.

Art is an artifice that you try to make seem natural.

I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

You think you know yourself, the world. You believe you've got a bead on everybody else's bullshit, but what about your own?

People gave names to things so they could tell stories about them, goddam fairy tales about children who got out alive.

Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.

Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez's powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.

There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten’s prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.

Not many people know this ... but I happen to be famous.

A lot of people may not know this but I'm quite famous.

I think it's therapeutic when we play. It's just like therapy.

Thank God I don't live in Los Angeles. I think if you're there the whole time it just gets out of proportion and you lose touch completely with reality.

If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.

The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.

You freeze with the number of opportunities given to you and just decide to do nothing at all.

I like throwing snowballs at small children.

If you lived through the shooting of Jaws, you can live through anything.

The moment you have kids, you are prey to judgment, but you also become a judge. You find yourself going, "Can you believe what she did with such-and-such?" at school.

I've made movies that cost less than one car chase. But that's part of the pleasure of doing it, pushing yourself in new directions.

Every Bond is different and every generation needs a different Bond and it's been able to move with the times.

I've made movies that cost less than one car chase.

One movie is only one movie. I want to have a lifetime of making films.

People who believe in painting... realize there is something greater than just coming up with an idea, and executing it.

You take that leap of faith. You have to be willing to follow, blindly, wherever it takes you. If you know where you're going beforehand, you're not going to end up with anything worth knowing.

In a very small way, painting addresses the 'Big Questions' to which we'll never find the answers. You do what you have to do even if it seems hopeless.

How do you create something unknown?

I understand acting and I understand actors. I don't really understand the world of celebrity. That's just bizarre. Those sorts of elements I'm at sea with.

I like actors. I like their insecurities, their humor and their intelligence.