The idea of being on a show where each season stands alone, and you can come back the next year and show an entirely different aspect of your personality or your talent or your anything is an enormous gift that you rarely get in television.
Thank God I had all these family values or who knows where I'd be now.
I worked for a lot of candidates, in tough campaigns that lost. Most of my candidates lost until Bill Clinton. There was always a point where you look in their eyes and they knew it was over. And there was never that point with Clinton. He never quit. He never gave up.
I come from a small town and I come from a background where we didn't have money to travel. I thought I'd have to join the military to get to Europe. So I'm thrilled to travel.
I'm doing pretty good for myself, and I'm very proud and very humbled at where I'm at, and I'm extremely blessed.
I've seen people who stink, but the film editor shows them just where they didn't stink. But if you're empty and manipulative on stage, it's clear.
I came to New York when I was eighteen years old, and the first audition that I ever went to was this huge cattle call at the Equity building where I had gone two days earlier to sign up - I didn't have an agent or anything.
Sometimes when things are way too big and I can't control it, I do sort of a weird thing where I kind of check out a little bit. It's all about self-preservation for me.
There is a Mount Sinai for every child of God if he only knows where to find it.
It's much easier for people to compare wages or identify bad employers or discuss bad labor practices in the Internet economy than it was in, say, a factory environment, where that stuff wasn't usually published or available.
As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends.
A family is a place where principles are hammered and honed on the anvil of everyday living.
But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
My dad's from that generation like a lot of immigrants where he feels like if you come to this country, you pay this thing like the American dream tax: like you're going to endure some racism, and if it doesn't cost you your life, well hey, you lucked out. Pay it; there you go, Uncle Sam. I was born here, so I actually had the audacity of equality.
I actually then went on to direct an after-school special where one of the characters was deaf. They hired me without even knowing I had any connection to the community.
The first real thing I heard was Three O'Clock Blues by B.B. King. That's where it all began for me.
I loved music, but I found myself at the point where I wanted to die. I didn't care about life.
I think everything belongs in a certain place, for kids who feel they don't belong anywhere. A museum is an institution like a library where everything has a place, everything belongs.
It's all about tuning out the noise, tuning out all the stuff that simply doesn't move the game forward - the doubt, the personal agendas, the often deafening fear of judgment and the need to please - so that you can ultimately get to that place of quiet, of calm, where you can focus on what really matters.
A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises.
I've done plays where you get into the run and can go to auditions during the day, or can have lunch with someone, and then you go to half-hour and show up.
We're absolutely American and distinctly so, I think. That's part of what people respond to outside of this country, part of the reason that we're such a huge band outside of the U.S., where we're not so popular now as we were 10 or 12 years ago.
I don't think there have been many alien movies where the actors have actually seen the aliens.
I live in a rural residential area. It's a great place for a walk. I'm at my happiest when I'm listening to my iPod while walking around where my feet take me.
I really love sort of classical cinema where people were telling stories with very little dialogue, and people were using the camera in a really interesting way.
Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.
Today, especially, when there are so many stations for viewers to choose from, if they want news, they always come to CNN and that's where I wanted to be.
NASA needs to focus on the things that are really important and that we do not know how to do. The agency is a pioneering force, and that is where its competitive advantage lies.
For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It's a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person, and things happen to them, and then something big happens, and they realize something new.
Gangster movies are the inheritor of the Greek tragedy: it's the only genre where the audience will be disappointed if there's not a tragic ending.
I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.
I feel we live in the kind of culture now where you have to be very smart to navigate the right way, and I just don't have those smarts. I think with age and time it will change, but I can't obsess about it.
My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is.
I like going to areas where the murder rate is high and dropping it.
Respecting other people's cultures is well and good, but I draw the line at where some branches of Islam, what they do to women. It's indefensible.
You know, usually with movies there are periods, dark areas, where I might not be getting what I wanted out of a theme. I'll have to go over and over it again.
