The film is not a success until it makes money. It's only good when there's a dollar figure attached to the box office.

Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you've known them for a long time.

Any time you stop looking at evil as a black and white thing, it's helpful. So the fact that there won't be any obligatory Islamic terrorist stereotypes in movies any more, that'd be helpful.

I have a bit of a rebellious nature.

I guess maybe I'm idealistic.

I think the more you expose yourself as a celebrity, the less interesting you are to watch in your work, because if you're putting yourself out there all the time, you're not holding anything back.

I was a teen star. That's disgusting enough.

I've seen the people who talk about their love lives in print invariably have doomed relationships with the person they're talking about.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

New York's like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it's like a Fellini movie or something.

I think good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not. It's like an affair with no mess. You don't actually consummate it, but you get to pretend, imagine what it would be like.

Good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not. It's like an affair with no mess.

It seems to me that one thing people do over and over again is try to figure out how to get married, stay married, fall in love, how to rekindle all this stuff. It seems to me to be a pretty eternal theme so I don't know if you can get typecast from making movies about men relating to women. It seems to be what is going on on the planet a lot.

When applied to politics and taken to its extreme, kitsch is the mask of death. Fascism was all aesthetics. There was no core principle to it. There was no truth to it.

The film is not a success until it makes money. It's only good when there's a dollar figure attached to the box office.

Death is a billion-dollar business. They can't even pass a law where it takes seven days to get a gun. Why don't you have to go through the same kind of screening you do to get a driver's license? It's totally insane.

Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.

The reason bin Laden staggered the planes going into the towers was so every camera would be focused on the second tower when the plane hit. It was not only the murder, but the perpetual image of the horror that permeated into people's consciousness.

I think when you get to the point where you don't need to be in love, then you could be in love. You have to just be OK with yourself-and that's a long process.

I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted.

The more you expose yourself as a celebrity, the less interesting you are to watch in your work, because if you're putting yourself out there all the time, you're not holding anything back.

A lot of people are not meant to be together.

I was never interested in being an overly public person.

I love these movies where it's just about the film. You don't have my face on the poster. It's all about the movie. I like that.

I feel like I'm a filmmaker; I don't feel I need to yell action and cut.

There are some good people. But a good chunk of them will lie for no reason at all - it'll be ten o'clock and they'll tell you it's nine. You're looking at the clock and you can't even fathom why they're lying. They just lie because that's what they do.

I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.

Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?

The British keep employing me, and that makes me like them. It also makes me think they're very intelligent.

Usually I play people who just keep babbling on and on and on.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

Art is spiritual.

Being on a movie set is like one long financial crisis.

Hitler was so modern, in that he was obsessed with being famous. He was caught up with this rush to be have achieved greatness before turning 30.

I was raised Catholic until I was old enough to say no.

Nope, no sex scandals yet. But I am open to offers!

A lot of powerful people in Washington may think it's a crazy-leftist-fringe position to think the intellectual authors of a torture regime should be investigated and prosecuted.

Acting can be pretty challenging. I can't say making a romantic comedy is challenging, but to do anything well, you have to put yourself into it.

But no, I don't really like romantic comedies, so I don't really care. I never go see 'em.

But, you know, I'm sorry, I think democracy requires participation. I mean, I don't want to proselytize but I do feel some sort of duty to participate in the process in some way other than just blindly getting behind a political party.

Every role you do is kind of a side of yourself. That's why they give you the part.

Getting trapped back in the '80s, it's almost like a comic nightmare, which for me is a very real nightmare. Every time I flip through the cable, I have flashbacks.

Hopefully as you get older you get more selfless. That would be probably a good goal. I don't know if we do, though.

I am rich enough.

I don't tend to think in terms of a moral authority - be a good boy, do good things - more in terms of what feels right.

I don't want to produce anymore small or independent movies because it's just too hard these days.

I force people to have coffee with me, just because I don't trust that a friendship can be maintained without any other senses besides a computer or cellphone screen.

I just love the process of working with other actors.

I kept saying that I'd never live in L.A., and I didn't think I would. But that's where the work is, and I ended up making a lot of friends there, and my old friends moved out to Los Angeles too. And also, I think when you're famous, its hard to live in a small town.