You want to make an impression. Being clever helps.

I teach at USC. I have a big class of 360 kids, only about a fifth of whom are film majors. I don't just show the Hollywood blockbusters. I show independent films, foreign films, documentaries.

Television is what made It's a Wonderful Life the classic it is today.

A Christmas Carol is such a fool-proof story you can't louse it up.

Dumbo... makes me cry. Every single time and in the exact same spot. I just have a special affection for Dumbo.

Hollywood executives believe that money is both the be-all and end-all to the moviemaking process.

Los Angeles has the greatest concentration of surviving movie palaces in the United States, yet most residents have never been inside one of them.

If I were less than honest as a critic, I think people would spot that right away, and it would destroy my credibility.

Movie theaters still exist in spite of all of the alternatives that are available, video and video-on-demand and DVD and streaming video and all of these things.

NBC anchor Brian Williams is a standup comic in disguise.

Polar Express is not an attempt to do animation. It is a technology-based film.

I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.

Atticus Finch. That's who I want to be when I grow up. He's the greatest guy ever - a good dad, a good lawyer, doing the right thing. And he knows he's not supposed to win, but he's doing it anyway.

A man who writes for a living does not have to go anywhere in particular, and he could rarely afford to if he wanted.

If I don't make music I'm going back to the hood. I'll sell crack. I'm gonna go back to sell crack if I can't make it in the music business and that's what I was doing before that.

When one with honeyed words but evil mind Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

Some have called Afghanistan 'the graveyard of empires,' and it probably is the graveyard of empires.

Learning how to relive again on life's terms sure doesn't do much for your confidence. You have to kind of walk in faith that the next step is going to be just a little bit better than the last step.

When I was young, it was an exciting time to be in New York.

Lovers need to know how to lose themselves and then how to find themselves again.