Everybody in the South loves the one closeted homosexual who's married. It's just too funny to not have in a movie about the South. It's an epidemic. You gotta represent!

After all, the ordinary hero hiding in each of us is often the most powerful catalyst for change.

In the South, we tell stories. We tell stories if you're in a sales position, if you're in a retail position, you lure your customer by telling a story. You just do.

I love going back in time, and the only time you can really do that is on a movie set.

To write, you have to know how to act and know about directing. To act, you also need to know how to write and direct.

I don't steer towards anything. I steer towards character and truth. If it's funny then so be it. If it's dramatic, so be it. I just steer towards characters.

I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing.

Don't stand back with your arms folded step forward... There is hope and light to resist injustice and promote peace without violence.

Unless, of course, you insist on identifying yourself with the people and things you love; and thereby seriously disturb yourself.

Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards.

Some women are to be captured by storm and some taken by siege; yet if there be not a traitor in her heart that shall deliver up the garrison, thou shalt not prevail over her.

When you take a man as he is, you make him worse. When you take a man as he can be, you make him better.

I love root vegetables: carrots, parsnips, and turnips.

If we dismiss from our minds the prejudice we may have against the Indians we shall be able to more clearly understand the impulses that govern both races.

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we'll never get used to it.