For me, one of the most important things I look for in an actor is whether we can converse. Do we have a similar ability to discuss a character?

I have gone insane. I won't be talking with you for a while.

Try to be as good a listener as you are a speaker. Don't just put the emphasis on saying things. Listen.

The first time I saw 'Sunset Boulevard' I was probably eight or nine years old, and it really struck me how it's so simply put and elegant, yet there's so much going on.

I really believe that if you're going to bring a child into the world, it's your job to parent that world. Especially if it's just you; you don't pawn her off on somebody.

I may not be wealthy; I'm living from pay check to pay check, but I get to make movies, which is what I love to do.

When you love something, it never goes away.

For me, I was given a great gift by my father and my mother in that I was never told any idea was bad. I was told I could explore any thought as long as I wasn't hurting someone else.

Some people are just not going to like me and they're not going to like my work. But that doesn't mean I'm a bad person.

My father is so jolly, and I live a really happy life. I think that's why all my interest in the darker things in films comes up: because I'm curious about things I don't live in.

Pressure is an emotional paralysis. It's hard enough to do the dishes when you're feeling pressured, let alone make a movie.

We do not have any other time other than today.

It is unseasonable and unwholesome in all months that have not an R in their names to eat an oyster.

The last thing you want to do is go down in the history of All-Star game competition as the only injury (his nose was broken by Roberto Hernandez) sustained during the team picture.

There are many Iranians working at NASA. One of the engineers involved with the spaceship that went to Mars is an Iranian.

After you have put food on your table, make sure you invest in really good walking shoes and a good bed.

I'm not certain that the BBC can claim to be making a wide enough range of distinctive programmes to make the case convincingly.

He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty.

I've always assumed he'd be around to be, you know, yelled at and taken for granted. And of course I was wrong. Nobody's going to put up with that forever.

That happy sense of purpose people have when standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet.

When students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut out the eyes.