These humiliations are the essence of the game.

The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.

As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.

It's an acting job - acting natural.

Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.

Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.

People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.

A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.

These humiliations are the essence of the game.

Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.

These doomsday warriors look no more like soldiers than the soldiers of the Second World War looked like conquistadors. The more expert they become the more they look like lab assistants in small colleges.

Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.

People, when they first come to America, whether as travelers or settlers, become aware of a new and agreeable feeling: that the whole country is their oyster.

The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries to come to conclusions that are right for him whether or not they coincide with your own.

Curiosity is free wheeling intelligence.

An Elephant can trumpet and shake the earth but not the self possession of the ants who hold it.

New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.

Texas does not, like any other region, simply have indigenous dishes. It proclaims them. It congratulates you, on your arrival, at having escaped from the slop pails of the other 49 states.

A professional; is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.

Things are more like today than they have ever been before.

My guess is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

When my hair was shorter, I used to get it done every couple of days... but I got tired of that.

Calvin Coolidge was one of the best presidents. Why? Because he did absolutely nothing.

I think one of the interesting things about poker is that once you let your ego in, you're done for.

My crown is called content a crown that seldom kings enjoy.

I'll tell you what I would do in a shot if I could. I would sing in the barbershop quartet in The Music Man.

I like to have fun, just stay relaxed.

My first visit to West Berlin was in February 1983. The drive through East Berlin, the fact that West Berlin was surrounded by a wall that was more than 100 miles long - the absurdity and intensity of it really knocked me out.

The rules are all wrong today. The mandate of the media really does pre-date the founding of the United States.

I've hung out at dozens of playgrounds, bored out of my mind, with not even a look of comfort from disapproving mothers all around me. Either they think I'm a pedophile or a deadbeat dad. That's what I get for being a single dad - suspicious looks at the playground.

I don't believe in sharing my money. If I go out and work my nuts off and make some money, I don't feel that I should have to share it with my community.

When he first started - Jim Henson, who created Bid Bird and Oscar - he said Big Bird was just a big, goofy guy. And it was - a script came along and I said, 'I think Big Bird would be much more useful to the show if he were a child learning all the things we were teaching in the show.' And so he didn't know the alphabet, even, for instance.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.

I've never been strong with my time-management skills.

Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect.

Three thousand people singing back your songs is an incredible feeling.

I'm not a prude. On the set, they called me 'Butt Naked.'

In recent years, anyone in the government, certainly anyone in the FBI or the CIA, or recently, in again, Clint's film, In the Line of Fire, the main bad guy is the chief advisor to the president.

I am always really buzzed after each performance, and at around one in the morning, I'll hit a brick wall and need to sleep.

I try to make fun of everyone as often as possible, especially minorities.

We are, of course, now against any other group burning Qurans. We would right now ask no one to burn Qurans. We are absolutely strong on that. It is not the time to do it.