I'm black and Cuban, Australian and Irish, and like most people in America, I'm someone whose roots come from somewhere else. I'm a mixed race, first-generation American.
Amazon may be the only studio that's run by people who come out of making independent movies, real hands-on moviemaking.
It's actually come as quite a shock to learn just how many people don't like me.
People have said I can come off a little trial-lawyerish. I tell people I never actually became a lawyer, but I play one at City Hall.
The writing gets done away from the keyboard and away from the studio in my head, in solitude. And then I come in and hopefully have something, then I wrestle with sounds and picture all day long. But the ideas usually come from a more obscure place, like a conversation with a director, a still somebody shows you, or whatever.
I think there's always a bit of pain in everything that's ecstatic - relationships and love, they always come with pain.
Frank called me one day and said, 'I have an idea for a movie, why don't you come over and I'll tell you?' So I went over and we sat down and he said, 'This picture starts in heaven'. That shook me.
Gun violence is a plague in all of our communities, and we must come together to stop it.
I've been around long enough to know that empires come and empires go, and I can't tell how long the Google empire is going to last - but I'm pretty convinced that the answer is less than forever.
I've decided 'Breaking Bad' may be one of the best TV shows ever, but I had to watch every last episode of the first four seasons to come to that conclusion.
Ramesh Ponnuru and others say Obama is a conventional liberal. But conventional liberals don't come out for the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Conventional liberals don't return the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. Conventional liberals don't block oil drilling in America while subsidizing oil drilling in Brazil.
If you look at America, one of the great strengths of America is its university towns and the way a lot of their businesses and a lot of their innovation and enormous economic growth have come from reducing that gap, getting those universities directly involved in start-up businesses, green field businesses, new development businesses.
Let's face it: Some of us need our burly men to come rescue us.
I'm not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don't have that many ideas. I've more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.
My father would go shopping, and he was supposed to buy loo roll or something, but he'd always come back with some fish or shellfish. And we've always had fresh vegetables from the garden. He is a massively keen gardener, so he grew all our tomatoes, artichokes, asparagus - whenever he wasn't working, he was in the garden.
I work on my novels wherever I have a PC, and I have four or five places around the world where I do have a PC. These days you can just slip a little flash drive into your top pocket, fly for 12 hours, come to another place, plug it into a computer and you are away again.
My sister made certain choices about the life she wanted. Those choices include a steady job, a husband and children. But balance and stability come at a cost. It is harder for her to be spontaneous. It is harder to just up and leave.
I fear that the rising personal bankruptcies and repossessions are the first signs of bigger problems to come and personal debt - Gordon Brown's legacy to millions of Britain's families - will hang like a millstone around the neck of the British people for years to come.
I admire people who come to politics because it takes a lot of courage to be in politics in India.
Spider-Man initially made me want to come to New York and work for Marvel; I wanted to be a comic book artist.
Everyone agrees to that; but when we come to define truth, dissension starts.
I've had losses in my career before, and I've always come back stronger from those losses.
I like the idea of acting. Of all these things I've done, sometimes I think I've done well, and sometimes I think I didn't do well, but they are more cameos, and I come in and be crazy.
Importantly, rather than being solely concerned with U.N. approval, the president must come first to our own Congress for authorization, and I urge him to do so. Finally, I understand the impulse to take action in Syria; however, I hope the president carefully considers this matter and resists the call from some to use military force in Syria.
If you come from a solid family structure, it doesn't matter what you go through in your life. You're going to be okay.
New Mexico should be a tech jobs leader and a haven for innovation, a place where the best and the brightest come to bring their products to market.
When you're in politics sometimes you step on toes and they come back and kick you in the backside.
Most artists are going into the studio for a fixed period of time, and they say that's their album. I can't relate, because I've never made music in that way. I come from a culture of editing and remixing.
If ergonomists have their way, future products won't be built for some hypothetical average person but will conform to the biomechanical needs of whatever particular human body happens to come into contact with them.
I come from a very loving, stable background where I've been persuaded to just be myself and anything is possible.
The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life's work.
I just always wanted to sit in a casting session and see all of the train wrecks that come in.
The idea of getting a lifetime job, and making $100,000 a year, with benefits, is dead and gone. It's over. And it may never come again. That's a very scary thought for a lot of people.
I make movies about people in spiritual crisis because it's a way for me to spend the time, the energy, the focus and the obsession to come to terms with my own spiritual crisis.
I like working really fast. The best ideas are the first ones that come into your head - so why bother thinking of any more?
Nobody who's thought about politics or democracy over the thousands of years that people have been thinking about democracy hasn't come up against the fact that the people will often be wrong. And what do you do when they are? You can't just say, 'Well, it's the will of the people.'
