You reach a point where you say you're not going to do juveniles any longer.

One of the great things about being a director as a life choice is that it can never be mastered. Every story is its own kind of expedition, with its own set of challenges.

Confidence is preparation in action.

If I had to choose between a great acting job and a good directing job, I'd choose the directing job.

Humor is unavoidable. It might not feel funny in the moment, but more often than not there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Death can be experienced once, winning maybe more, but losing can happen all the time.

I've just looked for ideas and great characters that I relate to and that I think I can offer something to the audience, and I no longer look at them as experiments or genre exercises at all.

I think the most important thing really was that you could take very personal ideas and present them to an audience in entertaining ways.

There's a very real argument that the minute we are capable of going to a planet, whether it's Mars or another one, and inhabiting it, that we really should.

I'm not a caterer. I just have to stay with my creative convictions. At some point, you have to just get past the special-interest groups and do what you're there to do, which is make a movie.

You're always a little surprised when something really takes off.

Maybe growing up was just about becoming closer to the person you always were.

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

I'm sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you're confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.

The failure in Ohio to have adequate voting capacity for the people who were registered and eligible to vote was an absolute denial of their right to vote.

I moved out to LA, got an agent, started auditioning. I didn't know anything about how it worked. And since I was really bad, luckily, I didn't get any of those parts.

Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.

I got kicked out of high school, so I couldn't get into very many colleges.

No one is beat till he quits, no one is through till he stops. No matter how hard failure hits, no matter how often he drops, a fellow's not down till he lies in the dust and refuses to rise.

I think it's very important not to grow up with the unhealthy amount of attention that is sometimes put on people because they are 'actors'.

At midlife, you're pregnant with the best self you can be - someone who has learned enough from both successes and failures to add up to a fine human being.