You can take a handful of dollars, a good story, and people with passion and make a movie that will stand up against any $70 million movie.

I made three movies in 1995 and I was unhappy with all of them: Sleepers, Incognito, and Speed 2.

Training Day was such a Hollywood movie; I didn't like it.

Now, being on the cover of Vanity Fair is as important as being in great movies. The lines are very, very blurred.

I don't find movies interesting. I just want to do the movies that made me interested in getting into movies, and they're few and far between.

I never turned down a movie because they wouldn't give me enough money.

I think The Exorcist is the best American horror movie ever made. Friedkin was at the top of his game.

I don't like people who use the press to advance themselves in a way that they haven't earned as an actor, performer or director.

When you look at some of the most respected actors there are and the crap that they're in... it didn't used to be that way.

It's interesting to help someone find their vocabulary. There would not have been a De Niro without a Scorsese.

Pacino's always played the suffering prince. I just find that interesting.

You can take a handful of dollars, a good story, and people with passion and make a movie that will stand up against any $70 million movie.

I was making a lot of independent movies before the independent movement.

I think that's what I really liked about Narc: My character has a real operatic range in a way that older movies used to have.

I would never do something like Speed 2 again. If I'd wanted to make those kind of movies I could have signed up for five of them while it was in the can. It wasn't worth it to me. That was just an innocuous, boring movie.

I try to stay under the radar.

I have a problem with the blatant celebrity exhibitionism that happens in this business and being sold purely as a brand.

I really tried to make movies I wanted to see. I thought that if I was good enough, somebody would always need me.

Mostly I do films that mainstream Hollywood wouldn't touch.

You know how many movies it took Tom Cruise before he was making 5, 6 million dollars? It probably took a billion dollars in box office.

Everybody acts like they're in a movie in most movies. That's why they stink.

It's easy to be a movie star. The shoes are already there. They just put you in the shoes.

When actors talk about research, they're just patting themselves on the back.

I don't have a problem with fame. I got into this business intending to be very successful, but I wanted it to be at my price.

I have all this time between projects, and I'm not so sure that's a healthy thing. It's scary, because at 36 I'm woefully unqualified for anything else.

If I was coming into the business today, I wouldn't be in it. Knowing what I know, absolutely not.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

If you're doing something new you've got to have a vision. You've got to have a perspective. You've got to have some north star you're aiming for, and you just believe somehow you'll get there, which kind of gets to the passion point.

But my passion is racing cars. It's what I like to do in my off time.

Strength of mind rests in sobriety; for this keeps your reason unclouded by passion.

It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it's like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.

I respect people who feel things passionately. I do. But when someone is a judge, that is not what they should bring to the bench. It is not really passion, except in rare instances, that serves the bench well. It is, rather, an ability to understand the law and follow it.

I would love to do more music, definitely. That is my true passion. Dance is first and then music.

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.

These are the sort of things that push you on in music - the curiosity, a passion for new ideas.

But music raises a lot of issues. Music is something that matters to people a lot, and they put a lot of passion into it. And I think when you have an area like that, you're gonna find a lot of issues coming up.

My desire, my passion, was to help moms with practical encouragement.

One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.