I'm very active in pushing for net neutrality and an open Internet. There are countless other causes I support personally and privately, but I try to keep my public activism fairly focused.

If you have a lot of fans, you have a powerful soapbox, but you still have to have something to say when you're on that soapbox if you want to make a real difference.

If some dude I'd never heard of managed to broadcast a platitude like that to the whole globe, I'd probably just feel like I was being spammed.

What puts me in a vulnerable state? Beauty, wonder, surprise, mystery. Stuff like that.

My best ideas almost always come from winding up in unexpected places and stumbling across things I never could have imagined in advance.

There's no hope of people paying attention to your music video if you don't let others use it.

Actually, here is something I'm passionate about that, looking around me, seems like the world at large must not care about as much as I do: craft.

I can have fairly crippling self-criticism. It doesn't really put me in a vulnerable state, I just get glum and intolerable, but it certainly is a vulnerability.

I like shooting things in single takes. You have to rely on the idea itself to carry the full weight; you're always watching the idea, not the filmmaking.

It's the good old paradox of democracy. We are individually pretty small drops in the bucket, but collectively we are all powerful.

Everyone loves the idea of internet fast enough that HD movies download in seconds, but if only the telecoms or their partners get to use the high speeds, it's not the internet: It's glorified cable.

[Attributional] factors serve as conveyors of efficacy information that influence performance largely through their intervening effects on self-percepts of efficacy

We didn't love freedom enough.

Like snowflakes,' Franny said,'none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before

The ability of a country to wage war is not an accurate measure of its strengths, but of its fears.

Really proud of it. A great campaign. And I'm really pleased with the organization and the thousands of South Carolinians that worked on my behalf. And I'm very gracious and humbled.

Perhaps Harvard's greatest contribution to our nation is its requirement that its on-leave professors who want to keep their crimson seats must return from Washington after 24 months.

If a white cloth is stained even with a small spot, the stain appears very ugly indeed. So the smallest fault of a holy man becomes painfully prominent.

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.

I don't do live things.

Your tendency to be inward-directed or outward-directed is huge; it governs every part of the way you live and work and love.