But people do the same thing with the Bible. They memorize all the fictional characters, the parameters and the rules of the game and think it's important, but I can't get excited about that myself.

Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.

How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.

Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.

You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.

Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.

Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective.

Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you see how it fits.

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.

I'm choosing to suffer less. To put myself and my family through less pain.

This is painful and it will be for a long time.

The Jesus I follow is the peacemaker, is one who says forgive your enemies, who worries about the poor, who worries about the poorest of the poor instead of the richest of the rich.

When you do a film, you start to get the character, and then it disappears for a year before it's released and you get feedback.

Become who you are by learning who you are.

Successful people take big risks knowing that they might fall hard. But, they might succeed more than they ever dreamed, too.

When a bunch of stuff is happening on set, you have to remember the grander purpose: you're telling a story, so you have to get to that moment, and that takes supreme focus.