It's been quite a ride. I loved every minute of it.

You can spend a lifetime, and, if you're honest with yourself, never once was your work perfect.

I've played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses - and that's probably enough for any man.

And their pals vote for their stuff when they're not on the panel, and it just keeps going that way. And they tend to be very fringe artists, so anything before the 20th century is not worth considering. This is out of date.

Undeniably the American art form, too. And yet more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example. And sometimes trash it completely.

Society mends its wounds. And that's invariably true in all the tragedies, in the comedies as well. And certainly in the histories.

Shakespeare is the outstanding example of how that can be done. In all of Shakespeare's plays, no matter what tragic events occur, no matter what rises and falls, we return to stability in the end.

The big studio era is from the coming of sound until 1950, until I came in... I came in at a crux in film, which was the end of the studio era and the rise of filmmaking.

The trouble with movies as a business is that it's an art, and the trouble with movies as art is that it's a business.

Dirty Harry, for example. Clint Eastwood was not a rogue cop. He was a maverick cop, but he was a good guy.

You could think of extraordinary examples to the contrary: The Grapes of Wrath... and even into the 70s.

Well, we have certainly produced great art before we did this. In my view, there are any number of areas of government which tax money should not be spent.

As an artist, I understand that, and I value the creative input of the artist.

You cut their money back, for one thing... I go back a long way with the NEA.

To the world, you are America.

It's been quite a ride. I loved every minute of it.

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.

An epic is the easiest kind of picture to make badly.

Political correctness is tyranny with manners.

It's my privilege to be able to play somebody not myself. I'm an actor who creates characters based in voice, movement, emotional quality, speech.

I think sometimes that people think brave means not being afraid, which of course it doesn't mean that at all. It means that you're afraid, but you move past that and do it anyway, do what you think is right.

I love animals, and I feel more of a connection to animals than people.

It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'

I had a really dark time after the Olympic Games... But then I said to myself, 'This is a sport that's blessed me with a home, with an education, with some money. I can't hate this sport. This sport took me out of Louisiana. This sport gave me a chance when so many people don't get a chance. And I love this sport.'

It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats to hide the truth in their breasts and show like jugglers another thing in their mouths.

The whole music world is based on the young, the very young people.

I don't enjoy putting my characters through hell unless there's a reason. I don't use violence or anything just for shock value. They're always a means to an end.

It was not the president's responsibility to run a law enforcement operation. It was ours.

I owe the public a good performance, the best I can give. We really bust our chops on 'CHiPs' but when I go home and get a weekend off, I want to spend it quietly, with my lady.

I had always wanted to lend my voice to a character. I did a voice for this video game, called 'Fallout 3,' and that was really fun.

Honey, have you ever seen a man knitting socks?

It is wrong to say the U.S. should "not take sides" in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

People can die, dreams cant.

Burn not thy fingers to snuff another man's candle.

There are two seasons in Scotland: June and Winter.

At one point, they offered me this part to play a drug-dealing, gun-selling butch lady. I don't know how to describe her but she had like a crew cut and stuff. I was like, 'Is this a joke?' And they said, 'No, we think it would be great because everyone would be like, 'Oh, look at what we've done to Charlotte.' I was like, 'Well I can't do that!'

Law is a formless mass of isolated decisions.

They had me doing Beach Boys remakes and all that. I was basically a marionette.

People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

Visually speaking, nothing calls Shakespeare to mind like Hamlet holding Yorick's skull.

I tell my grandchildren - I've got seven of them - to go to college and get that degree first. I could have stayed in college and still recorded. Isn't that something? The kids of today are doing it.

Anxiety is not fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you - a real and objective danger.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.