Now I feel I have an unspoken deal with the paparazzi: 'I won't do anything publicly interesting if you agree not to follow me.'

You will never solve poverty without solving water and sanitation.

I think what's important for kids to know is that your decisions here on earth matter, your behavior matters and how you treat other people matters.

If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they'd get bored in a day.

My wife is my soul mate. I can't imagine being without her.

I'm always cautious about overstepping any boundaries. At the end of the day, it's a director's medium, and if they don't want to hear from me I just step back.

Sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage

If you can't help people, then what is the point of being successful?

It's just better to be yourself than to try to be some version of what you think the other person wants.

Please find out what you can do to make a difference. Take five minutes to educate yourself on an issue you didn't know about before. Then tell somebody else.

Eventually stardom is going to go away from me. It goes away from everybody and all you have in the end is to be able to look back and like the choices you made.

The pain of an unpublished manuscript is akin to the trauma of bearing an unborn.

Don't worry. It's scientifically unlikely that the universe will explode into a million particles at any given moment.

I travel all over the world, usually 10 months out of the year. I stay at a lot of hotels, and the ones I like best are clean and not complicated. You go to bed and say, 'Wow, I feel comfortable.'

Everyone who knows me knows that I'm a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time.

Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.

I don't want it all to be pretty - it's a combination of loss and gain. Things are born, live and hang in limbo. That's what life's about.

Give a kid a book, and you change the world. In a way, even the universe.

He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is sometimes the longest.

The past is history written in stone that can't be altered. The future is transitory and never guaranteed. Today is the only thing you can alter for certain. Make the most of it.

The desert is an ideal illusion of a blank slate - so much mystery in endless layers is hidden underneath its bright, pseudo-sterile surface.