I think more money can be very detrimental to movies and TV because things get solved economically rather than creatively, and that's never a good solution.
The world is a slightly better place for having improvisation in it than it was before. There's something about it that says something positive about the human spirit, that a bunch of people can get together and by following a few simple traffic rules can create art and can entertain an audience and can thrill and exalt each other.
Is there anything worse than being called the 'It Girl?' By definition, there will be a new one in two weeks.
I think celebrity has become almost normalized. I feel like we all live our lives in a pale imitation of celebrity. With Facebook, we choose a photo that is not too good a photo - we're more arch than that. We're our own celebrity publicists. We understand it so innately.
The 1993 Trade Center bombing was obviously frightening. It could have been much worse than it was.
My family was pious and Presbyterian mainly because my grandfather was pious and Presbyterian, but that was more of an inherited intuition than an actual fact.
I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
I've always hung out with people older than me, with my parents' friends, because I appreciated the conversation.
It's better to focus on one film rather than take up two or three films at the same time.
If I sleep for more than half an hour, I get horrible dreams in which I'm firing a gun and helicopters are coming down.
The words that I'm most happy with are the ones that come from my subconscious rather than my conscious. They just feel right. I think that's the same with music, really. If you're doing an album, there's ten or eleven sets of lyrics, so you get to the point of inspiration ten or eleven times - it's difficult.
Things are old. Parts are old. I'm talking about 'us' parts. AARP-parts. Some of us were born with stronger parts than others.
To me, getting to do music and videos, you work on a character. Being onstage is acting; you get to be larger than life and larger than yourself.
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
'Star Trek' scared me a lot more than 'White Jazz.' It terrified me, really. Because of the scale, the responsibility, the fact that it was this iconic character. It was the bigger challenge, so I had to take it.
Obviously, you have quieter years than others - you don't go jumping out of a plane every day.
In some countries we have had the right to vote for less than 100 years, so the entry of women into political leadership has caused a tsunami.
If you actually keep things very organized and clutter-free, you can have more furniture than you think you can in a small space.
There is a lot of food culture that goes on in the home and in the community in non-traditional ways. Food is a lot more than restaurants.
I think that there's the self-imposed pressure to come up with something that's good. For guys like us, that's much more important than any external pressure could really be.
I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while - like, 150 years or so. I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.
When somebody listens and laughs, you're always in better shape than when you're with those folks who just kind of look at you when you say something funny. You wonder if they're looking at you because they're mad that they didn't say it or something. It's hard to handle that.
Now an audience of more than 1 billion people is only a click away from every voice online, and remarkable stories and content can gain flash audiences as people share via social networks, blogs and e-mail. This radically equalizes the power relationship between, say, a blogger and a multibillion dollar corporation.
Spending money is much more difficult than making money.
I cannot tell you that I ever fell in love with the theater as an audience. I fell in love with the theater as an actor for a period of time, but I have struggled as an audience, and I struggle more now than then. I was always a movie guy.
My dark sound could be heard across a room clearer than somebody with a reedy sound. It had more projection. My sound always seemed to fill a room.
I'm not a master; I'm just a hard-working filmmaker. I would like everyone to see me as a friend rather than a master.
We're normal people. Don't be scared because we are in a chair. People don't understand that. They think, 'Oh, a wheelchair, something's wrong with their heads, something's just not right.' Well yeah, we may be a little twisted, but no more than anyone else.
Some people are better at handling the limelight than others.
Corporate governance is a huge issue too. We don't have women on these corporate boards. More than half of the students in law school are women, more than half of the women, I think, in medical school now are women.
Nothing has more impact on my district than unemployment.
We are spending more as a percentage of our entire economy, almost 25 percent, than we have spent at any time since the end of World War II.
I like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.
I've always had a more spatial mind, mathematical, than literal.
When you have kids, they are the consistent things in your life. They don't change no matter what's going on. They love you. They are more honest than anybody will be.
