Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

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.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.

Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.

Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.

I liked Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and that is the kind of character that I would like to have played. That would have been more in tune with who I really was.

It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.

In a lot of ways, the make-up was the character.

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

So many people have said that to me, that what they really like about Alex is what she brings out in Marissa, and what this situation brings out in her, a hint of happiness and another side to her character.

I've been on the show for six years and I don't even know what her history is. I sort of make things up in my mind, but I think it's hard for an audience to follow and invest in a character when they don't have the details.

It is not true that drink changes a man's character. It may reveal it more clearly.

Because I killed a guy in real life, and because my character kills a guy onstage, they said I could never do anything this great again. I resented that.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

I just kind of understood it, and I threw my love for others and love for life into the character, and was having a blast. I loved playing Dharma. I loved it!

I think if you play a character that is fearless, then it's boring. I think that's what was so incredible about Harrison Ford, is that he always seemed like he was never going to survive it, he's always scared, and yet he always does survive it somehow.

If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself - your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers.

Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we're all heroes of our own lives.