What matters to me is my own estimation, and I'm very tough on myself. I need to be proud of what I've done and I work hard for it. I had a very Christian upbringing... lots of guilt. A good thing, It keeps you sane.
Whatever your favorite food is, if you eat it every day for a month, you're going to get sick of it.
Sometimes I take the watch, or I take the shoes, but usually the souvenir is to take the life you had with those directors, or the crew - the camera person, the lighting person. When you finish a film it's like a little death. You had a family for a bit, and you finish the movie and you probably will never see each other again.
In Cuba, where Wi-Fi is both slow and terrible, you will be an emissary from the future, a hint of the degeneracy to come. You're a full-on mainlining internet junkie with the world's uproar piped into your head 24/7, your emotional landscape terraformed and buffeted by whatever some narcissist just posted on Instagram or some windbag on Twitter.
Imagine the situation between Israel and Palestine. It's such a big mess. You can be on one side or the other. But what's clear is that there's an urgent need for a solution there and that's been dragging on for so long.
If I'm going to be honest with you, when I trained at school, I feel like I was training to be a chameleon. I want to be that versatile actor who can do anything - that's why you learn fifty different dialects, you do Shakespeare, you do commedia, you do it all so that if any job comes your way, you should be able to do it.
You can't not have feelings about country clubs, whichever side you're on.
The older you get, the more you learn.
I don't mock things, which makes me more vulnerable to mockery myself. If you're cynical, you're protected from mockery. But I have to be nice. I don't think I have irony. A sense of humour, yes, but not irony.
I'm so not scary. I'm a pussycat. But what are you going to do, right? I mean, these cheekbones, and I guess these eyes, and the big nose... this is what my momma and my poppa gave to me, and that's the deal.
People asked if I could have played the Terminator. Are you kidding? Not a chance, I never could have played the Terminator.
The reason it has taken so long for the robotics industry to move forward is because people keep trying to make something that is cool but difficult to achieve rather than trying to find solutions to actual human problems. Technology can be extremely expensive if you don't focus.
You say that you hope I will be recognized as the best novelist of my generation. I want you to know now and know completely that that would mean to me absolutely nothing.
Cats are very independent animals. They're very sexy, if you want. Dogs are different. They're familiar. They're obedient. You call a cat, you go, 'Cat, come here.' He doesn't come to you unless you have something in your hand that he thinks might be food. They're very free animals, and I like that.
I hate when you see a film and after one scene you know what's going to happen and you can predict the whole story.
The Pentagon is a series of wedges. So you have - the outer wedge has windows on the outside, and then inside of that, it has windows with an alleyway; then there's another wedge with windows outside, windows inside. And we call them the E Ring, the D Ring, the C Ring.
If you're the person living closest to the parent who's going to need help, and you take on the whole role of primary caregiver, you can be pretty sure your sibling who lives farthest away is going to call you and say, 'You don't know what you're doing.' Because they're not on the spot, and they probably feel guilty.
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant.
I was the first businessman to say, 'You should give tax benefit to only small companies. You should say your profits are exempt to a limit of Rs. 50 crore or so, but beyond that, you should pay taxes.' I have been arguing with successive finance ministers on this.
If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.
I'll tell you what I love doing more than anything: trying to pack myself in a small suitcase. I can hardly contain myself.
I never, in anything I've ever done, tried to get you to like it. I was never going to succeed at that. That's not the way most entertainment is made. Most entertainment is trying to get you. It's tested, like toothpaste.
The trouble when you die is that everyone says you were nice. I would like to be thought of as genuinely nice. I would like there to be people who can honestly say, 'Len! Oh yeah, there was more good than bad in him.'
You have to free your mind to do things you wouldn't think of doing. Don't ever say no.
When you're in that scene, you really wonder if this is all you're ever going to be. You know how vile and filthy you are inside.
The black community now in many ways divided itself the way the larger white community divides itself, over class issues. And that race is no longer the bond that it once was. That's one of the prices you pay for progress.
These days an income is something you can't live without - or within.
If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.
I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.
You can't have a child just to keep a relationship together, can you?
There's no point stepping up to the golden platform if you're going to repeat yourself.
You can't tell a millionaire's son from a billionaire's.
I am always saying, 'I don't believe in God; I believe in Al Pacino.' And that's true. If I ever get a phone call saying 'Would you like to work with Al Pacino?' I would go crazy.
The biggest mistake in student films is that they are usually cast so badly, with friends and people the directors know. Actually you can cover a lot of bad direction with good acting.
Put your leaders in stressful scenarios. Make them figure out solutions under pressure. See if you can make them frustrated, angry, and flustered, and then demand decisive leadership from them. They will be challenged at first, but they will get better over time.
