It's rare that you cut out something that is really good. You screen all of it, and when the audience doesn't respond, you cut out whatever is holding the story down.

You just can't make any movie and it will be good now. This is a really a difficult time to be in films.

I think a lot comes from having the experience of doing stand-up comedy. It allows you to figure out the psychology of an audience; what things are funny and not.

In rare instances you have to give up what you thought was a great scene.

We've seen so many films now, that you have to be on par with the best films that have preceded you. You just can't make any movie and it will be good.

My brothers can be a little out of control sometimes and so somebody has to be able to keep them focused.

I go through a whole process with the actors first, building and creating characters, then I encourage them to sort of live in that character when they're in the screen.

I enjoy the character interplay. Sometimes the audience is not laughing, but smiling, and that is almost just as good because it keeps them ready to laugh.

It's the teenage and university crowd, so we give them lots of sex jokes and gross humour.

Creativity is the answer. I always prefer the creative solution to an expensive solution.

You can kind of feel when things are going to work out.

We felt like we had done as much as you can do with the slasher genre. We were trying to find the next group of scary movies that were ripe for parody.

I have been a director who has starred, participated on both sides of the filmmaking process.

There are two phases to a movie. First you shoot the movie, and then you make the movie. Generally, post-production is longer than filming.

I'm not on all the time. I like to have fun and be funny, but I'm much more of a thinker.

You do what it takes. It was on me to deliver.

Just making a good movie is hard to do.

This is really a difficult time to be in films.

I'm just calm under fire. I'm not intimidating at all.

It's rare that you cut out something that is really good. You screen all of it, and when the audience doesn't respond, you cut out whatever is holding the story down.

The pressures having grown up in this business can be really rough. And it is a testament to you that you have remained focused and NOT lost your mind.

I prefer the smaller budget versus the bigger budget because the mentality that goes along with big budget filmmaking doesn't really suit me; the mind-set that money is the answer.

I put the cameras on her and told her to be obnoxious as she could possibly could be. She was.

Slot machines are like crack for old people.

I like to have fun and be funny, but I'm much more of a thinker.

You never really know until you put the movie in front of an audience. I am a big advocate of screenings, which are getting harder and harder to do nowadays.

I always prefer the big laugh. That is always the objective, especially with a film like Scary Movie 2.

All I need is a camera and I'll make things happen.

We do nods to Charlie's Angels and Mission Impossible because they are popular with our fan base.

I throw it all in there, Kung Fu, blaxploitation, horror.

I put heavy emphasis on the characters.

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Obviously, after every film you do, you wonder what you're going to do next.

I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back.

Democracy give every man the right to be his own oppressor.

To what extent is any given man morally responsible for any given act? We do not know.

I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick.

While admirers of capitalism, we also to a certain extent believe it has limitations that require government intervention in markets to make them work.

Don't try to tell Namath's people on First Avenue about Babe Ruth, because they don't even know the name. In fact, with the young, you can forget all of baseball. The sport is gone. But if you ever have seen Ruth, and then you see Namath, you know there is very little difference.

I have not taken my good looks seriously from the beginning. When I would be teased by my friends about my looks, I would just make a self-deprecating remark and let it pass.

What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

Geometry is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind.

Mutual tolerance is the stepping stone to mutual respect. A hospitable mind is the key to a neighboring or an alien spirit, looked by dogma and guarded by tradition.

Since I am me, I find it very difficult to judge how fascinating listening to my nasal, heavily-accented drone for two hours would be to somebody who wasn't me.

Grown-ups are afraid for children. It's not children who are afraid.

Starbucks was founded around the experience and the environment of their stores. Starbucks was about a space with comfortable chairs, lots of power outlets, tables and desks at which we could work and the option to spend as much time in their stores as we wanted without any pressure to buy. The coffee was incidental.

The more rational we are, the more emotional we can be.

One of the reasons that I take such joy in being a trustee of the New York Public Library is the love of reading that I found as a child in the Saturday morning library events for preschoolers and first and second graders as I was growing up in Augusta, GA.