I love acting, but I am a mom, and the roles just weren't coming because of a mixture of things: because I'm not ambitious, and because I'm older, and I had a baby. I really felt like I had said a graceful and completely happy goodbye to acting in a significant way. And I had sort of made my peace with that.
My parents said that sitting at home playing video games all day won't bring you anywhere in life.
I pretty much knew that I was going to come in fourth, but then I said, 'I'm fourth at the Olympic Games. What are you talking about? Why is that disappointing?'
Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt.
Donald Trump is a little bit like I am. He says what needs to be said. Most of all, folks, he's not afraid of the United States liberal media. They dislike him nearly as much as they hate me.
I used to think that what scared me was the idea of being abandoned until someone said to me, 'Only children can be abandoned. Adults can't be abandoned because we have a choice. Children don't have a choice.'
Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.
I remember they used to tell me, they said, 'Khaled, you can't get a Rolls-Royce; you need to get one of them small ones.' So I went and bought a Phantom.
A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.
I always said, 'if we win, we all will profit.' So forget about the profit part of it; let's just win, and the rest will take care of itself.
When I first lived in a model apartment... It was two bunk beds to a room, and the bathroom was constantly in use. I was bringing in Lucky Charms cereal, and one day an agent put a stop to that. She said, 'You're making all the girls fat.' They took it off our grocery order. That was the most dramatic thing that happened.
When, in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously said government is the problem, not the solution, he established the Republican mantra that has not changed in all the years since. It was a clever bit of rhetoric, but it has turned too many Republicans into economic simpletons.
At one time Tribune Syndicate emptied out their storeroom. They put tables full of original cartoons down in the lobby and said take one if you want one. The comics were simply a burden to them.
An interesting insight into the ruthlessness of studio executives: I was having a conversation with Alex Gansa, a creator of 'Homeland,' and I said, 'So you guys must have seen 'Life' and liked me in it, right? That's the most recent thing I've done over here.' And he went, 'No, Damian. You actually nearly didn't get the job because of 'Life.'
I woke up one morning to an email from my friend Alex that said she'd had her bag stolen. Ordinarily, I'm quite quick on the uptake, but - maybe because of the way it was worded - I immediately replied, 'What??????' As soon as I hit send, I realised I was being scammed. But then they replied, and I thought, 'Well, why not?'
A bunch of my fans have come up to me and said, 'Because of you, and because you came out, I have finally begun to accept myself.' That is infinitely incredible for me. I didn't expect to get to the point where I would own up to it within myself.
For 'Jeremiah Johnson,' nobody wanted to make that film. I went to Sydney Pollack, and I said, 'Sydney, I live in the mountains, and I would like to make a film about a person that had to exist in the mountains and survive in the mountains.'
In the press, it has been said that I ran a foreclosure machine.
I said at the start of the race that the Tour is about being good for 21 days, being consistent every day, not having super days and bad days.
At the time of the formation of the euro, I would say most American economists said that's not a good idea; that's not a currency area that makes sense. And the answer from Europe was, 'How is Missouri and Mississippi a currency area?' But the flaw in that was not recognizing the importance of mobility.
I did a 'Love Boat!' And based on my trip on the 'Love Boat,' I said, 'I'd just as soon not do 'Fantasy Island.'
In the beginning of Roomba, we all took turns answering the support line. Once, a woman called and explained that her robot had a defective motor. I said, 'Send it back. We'll send you a new one.' She said, 'No - I'm not sending you Rosie.'
I think with motherhood and child-rearing in general, everyone's going to tell you how to do it and why. I've always said to other mothers and women when they've asked me, that you have to find your own way and find out what works for your family, at all costs.
There are a lot of parents who've come to me and said about their daughters, 'Oh my God, she's 21, she's totally flailing. Your story gives me hope.' I put my mom through that.
Like I've always said, love wouldn't be blind if the braille weren't so damned much fun.
I think feminism is that you just have to stick it all out. I remember this one time when someone interviewed me, and I was young, and they said, 'Do you see yourself as a feminist?' And I was like, 'I don't know. I'm not really comfortable calling myself a feminist.'
I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, 'Hey man, we don't go for that anymore.'
When the draft lottery came out, and the Clippers said they were gonna draft me, I went to Google to find out more about the Clippers because I didn't know a lot. And I was like, 'Okay, team owned by Donald Sterling.' So then I typed in 'Donald Sterling' in Google, and the first thing that pops up is 'Donald Sterling racist.'
Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of 'postmodern theatre'. So I said to my office, 'This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don't know what it means, but... they're paying me a lot of money, so I'll go.'
Some of the best auditions I've ever had have been when my agent called and said, 'They want you 20 minutes ago, in an office in Century City, to see you for something.' I'm not sitting there thinking for a week and a half, before I'm supposed to go in front of a network president to do something. That just gives you time to be nervous.
I went into a church and simply said, 'Goodbye.' It is the terrible unfairness of life. How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives? That is the question which finishes it for me.
I've said before that I'm a remarkably unsentimental person.
Probably Hobbes got it right when he said that a leviathan, a third party with a monopoly on the use of legitimate use of force in a territory, might be among the biggest violence reduction techniques ever invented.
I once got a letter from a woman who told me she was 90. She said if she were 30 years younger, I would have had to watch out. I guess 60 seems really young when you're 90. She said she would eat me with a spoon.
Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, 'Children's Letters to God.' You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.'
If someone said, 'You've got to eat your next two meals at American fast-food restaurants,' I would do one meal at Chipotle and one meal at Popeyes fried chicken.
