I went to Washington to ask for a little residual payment for the people who had written films in the early, early days, people who never got any residuals on tapes or anything at all.

When I'm in New York I look at the Empire State Building and feel as though it belongs to me ... or is it vice versa?

Sometimes I worked with just a background of a rock or a tree or black velvet, and just had to imagine the whole thing.

My children didn't when they were little because I thought that they had to be of a certain age. I hoped they liked me well enough not to want to see me in that sort of a spot.

They were very considerate, I must say. Every time I felt I was about to slip out of these fingers and would yell for help, they'd let me down and re-organize things.

Only in your imagination can you revise.

Recently, a six-year-old boy said to me, "I've been waiting to meet you for half my life."

Lillian Gish thought that there should be a cabinet position for the arts and I think she was right. I think she was right.

Juan Tripp was a friend. Good name for an airline man, huh? Juan Tripp after another?

Paul Lucas had a particularly amusing accent, so I chuckled. That was terrible; I shouldn't have done that, but he took it too big. He got up and said he couldn't work with people who laughed at him!

As far as advice, that will be in my next book, my next collection. I certainly never like to instruct anyone, but just say as I feel. That's the same as advice, isn't it?

When we get too comfortable in our routine we stop challenging ourselves. Complacency is the silent dream killer.

Say not: I live today, I shall die tomorrow. Divide not reality between life and death. Say: now I live and die.

For a woman, love is the highest dream, and if a man promises to build a ladder tall enough to reach it, she believes him, hikes up her skirt, and follows him to the stars.

There's no way that scientists can ever rule out religion, or even have anything significant to say about the abstract idea of a divine creator.

I once was lost, but now am found.

The whole city stopped - And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again.

I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

To be honest, because there's loud music in my ears probably three hours a day, between sound check and the show, I listen to podcasts more than I listen to music on the road.

Every American was to become a performing self.