I studied with Sandy Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse. I was in the last class to study with him before he had his larynx removed, so I actually remember the sound of his voice. He was an incredible teacher.
I had long known the story of Aaron Burr, but when I heard about his remarkable daughter, Theodosia, about the relationship between the two and about her tragic disappearance, I knew I wanted to tell their story.
My generation had to be taken seriously because we were stopping things and burning things. We were able to initiate change, because we had such vast numbers. We were part of the baby boom, and when we moved, everything moved with us.
I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.
Acting was the only place that I ever felt like I belonged so went for it with everything I had.
Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.
I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.
In the old days they, the promoters, wanted more and more from me. They wanted me to jump or spill my blood and break my bones. Every time they wanted me to jump further, and further, and further. Hell, they thought my bike had wings.
I met my wife, I had no money, I had nothing, and I started my family without really, my career was nowhere, but I had these other businesses, I had these things I was doing to be able to afford a small home.
The Hamptons are usually filled with what I had hoped to leave behind in New York City.
You all had something to do with keeping me employed.
I did not destroy the 43 volumes of my diary, which report on all these events and the share I had in them; but of my own accord I handed them voluntarily to the officers of the American Army who arrested me.
The young man who's had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life - he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he's never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn't walk out onstage needing to walk out there, he doesn't have a dream of doing well.
I didn't like the way a wet cotton T-shirt felt under my equipment. There had to be something better.
I'd had a really bad car accident years ago, and basically, the ligaments in the back of my neck were ripped, and I'd never addressed that.
It was a lot of fun on the set. I had the most fun making that movie out of all of them. I'm sure if I sat and thought about it, but none that I could think of offhand.
I've had ups and downs in my career, and if you look at it as a bookmaker, the odds of me becoming a world champion were never in my favour, but I never stopped believing in myself and never stopped trying.
I've had affairs. But I'm not the sort of man who has 10,000 affairs.
My relationship with my mom is really the single most profound relationship that I've ever had in my life.
And just when we were at the end of our design process there was the news that the Italian government and the U.S. government had signed an agreement to fly the first Italian astronaut on that flight.
If I hadn't left Texas, I might not have met the director Terrence Malick, and I wouldn't have met my husband and I wouldn't have had the children that I've had. Life is interesting like that.
I don't want to be daft and say I had some spiritual awakening or something, but I really did come of age in Los Angeles, where we recorded the album. I had my own little house and my own little circle and I really got to feel how the city ticks.
I've had a few gigs where things have got out of hand and there has been a huge crush with my fans. They are important and I don't want them being hurt. They are a mad crowd.
I had great friends, support and teaching at Wake Forest.
The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the '20s and '30s, and it has really nothing to do with the West and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was.
When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.
Anyone graduating from medical school in 1966 had first to fulfill military service before launching a career. Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, I sought to avoid it through an assignment to the Public Health Service.
I had watched for many years and seen how a few rich families held much of Argentina's wealth and power in their hands. So Peron and the government brought in an eight hour working day, sickness pay and fair wages to give poor workers a fair go .
I once stayed in a roach-infested hotel in Istanbul for a work trip. I had to share my room with a male model, and pointedly all we talked about was our other halves.
In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.
It was very important that it be done in such a way that it be executed with complete conviction. If I had done it both ways, if I was trying to cover myself in case it didn't work, then it would have been to no purpose.
If you do what you've always done, you just get more of what you have always had. We've now got to dream big and act bold.
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
The moment that changed me for ever was when I had my first seminar with my history professor at the University of Sussex. I realised that history would answer all the questions I had spent my life asking. It was an extraordinary moment.
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
I always felt that I had anxiety of survival in terms of livelihood even when I was making plenty of money.
