Actors are good liars; writers are good liars with good memories.

There's a flipside to this; if you as an individual have the right to live on your own terms, you must have the right to both succeed and fail on them.

Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.

If there is a substantial difference between a gay couple and a childless heterosexual couple, I'm unable to see it.

So, we, as human beings, live in a very imprecise world. A world where our perceptions of reality are far more important than actual reality.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

There are, believe it or not, good politicians.

Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.

Actors are good liars; writers are good liars with good memories.

It's your body and your life and you have an absolute right to do with it as you choose.

Well, the future of the Internet is... Reality.

You want to balance the budget in this country? We change the salary structure for Congress and the President. Every year they don't balance the budget, we don't pay them.

There's no way for me to know, but my best guess, as it must be for everyone, is that other people are pretty much like me.

The universe is not fair and it is never going to be fair.

To write well you must be willing to go naked into the world.

What the power structure is afraid of is that we're going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it.

It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

The welfare system in the United States is vile.

If a liberal political philosophy stands for anything, and I am no longer sure it does, then it must mean that we are committed to the leveling of the playing field for everyone.

The most interesting thing about the idea of money is that it makes it possible to measure something in previous ages we couldn't be sure about, and that something is power.

You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

There is virtually nothing I wouldn't be willing to do, to try and make sure that children have a fair shake in life.

The reason Ronald Reagan gets slammed for having so badly exacerbated the problem of deficit spending is that he so plainly deserves it.

The federal debt in this country is principally of Republican design.

As a fiscal conservative, I think that our government should pay for itself.

Our species is on the verge of changes that will fundamentally alter what it means to be human... and we are the people driving that change.

We are reinventing the world. We've set the ball spinning with little concern for where and how it's going to stop.

I'm a liberal where children are concerned, a libertarian where adults are concerned - and thinking very seriously about running for the House of Representatives, for whatever that's worth.

Police do not belong in war zones.

It's obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect.

Actors love mental disorders, dialects, and corsets. Give them one of the three and they're happy.

What's fascinating is that when you write a script, it's almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you're not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.

Young actors often don't think of the consequences of doing nudity or sex scenes. They want the role so badly that they agree to be exploited, and then end up embarrassing family, friends, and even strangers.

I've seen many actors go awry by making the wrong choices early on.

Actors are able to trick themselves into treating anything as if it's fantastic. It's a kind of madness really.

David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

I like doing them and they're ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don't have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They're really fun, I want to make more of them definitely.

I'm not in the business of becoming famous. And that's the advice I give to younger aspiring actors. Work onstage and do the little roles. In the end it's not important to be seen. It's important to do. There's a lot of disappointment in this business, but my family keeps me grounded.

Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

I was very pleased you know, and I was afraid that I might stick out, but I didn't. My happiest thing about that picture is that I proved that American actors can speak as well and also fit in with an ensemble like that.

I've worked with a lot of really fine actors, both on stage and on screen. The level of their game lifts me up and brings the level of my game up to theirs. Always. It's like a constant upgrade.

I feel like I'm the most well-adjusted character on the show, even though I'm sure the other actors would tell you the same thing about their characters.

There's a constant flow of child actors. It's kind of funny to watch the new crew come through. I think, You poor little things. You're going to have to struggle for a long time.

I'll miss the relationships I have built with these actors. I'll miss the devotion we have to this work. Over this length of time, the tendency is to think it will never end.

After the war, there was no industry. We lost the war. We had our whole city destroyed. No money. No studio. No film. No camera. No equipment. We would shoot in the street. We had no actors. Nothing. But we wanted to do movies. And we did the best movies in the world.

An actors' tribute to me is in his work.

A few nights ago I went to a Hollywood screening of a small independent film made by Sally Kirkland, an old friend of mine who also did terrific job acting in it. There were other actors in it and they were all terrific.