There just doesn't seem to be a market for something with aspiration anymore.

I don't want to peak too early. The worry is that you never know until it's all over whether you peaked at all - and then you're finished and it's too late.

The film business is absurd. Stars don't last very long. It's much more interesting to be a proper actor.

I never did anything about my stardom, it never meant anything to me.

My occupation has been a great deal with David Foster Wallace, and he didn't manage it, and he was very much looking for something that isn't totally selfish, and finding meaning. It's a struggle.

I keep saying that backwards is all you can see. You can't see front. My wife says, "Stop, you're always in the past." She sees me sort of daydreaming.

I'm not religious. I love what Clive James said the other day. James is a brilliant writer, but he keeps on writing poems on stuff. And he said, "God doesn't have a leg to stand on."

This is something particular to actors, especially in plays, and in films, too - but in plays, it's like, don't get involved with anyone in the play.

My now-wife - we got together in '81, we married a few years after - she's been very good in the past about going in the theater with me to see actresses I had known. But then, she's not an actress.

It was still quite late when I got married, 30s, I don't know.

Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse.")

The prison bars deny you the now. You are forced to always think about the past or the future.

If you are ever drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations.

Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train...But we must at least take them to the station...to a point of departure.

Religion is using everything for God.

Words and action in movies are the spirit or the mind. And these days the body is almost completely forgotten. In the beginning the body - nature - was more part of the action.

A community to be truly community, must have a quality of unselfconsciousness about it.

Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry.

My father-in-law was once Chairman of Military Affairs in the Senate, the latter part of the Wilson Administrations. He knew a lot about and was fond of the Army.

Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral