Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.

I had the great good fortune to interview Peggy Lee. Her memories of working with Walt Disney and his team were warm and upbeat.

A Christmas Carol is such a fool-proof story you can't louse it up.

I teach at USC. I have a big class of 360 kids, only about a fifth of whom are film majors. I don't just show the Hollywood blockbusters. I show independent films, foreign films, documentaries.

I think the people who are making Christmas-themed movies today feel that people are more cynical about Christmas. There's more of an edge.

Movie theaters still exist in spite of all of the alternatives that are available, video and video-on-demand and DVD and streaming video and all of these things.

I'm a lifelong Disney nut.

I think people in Hollywood are afraid of sentiment because they think audiences will reject it.

Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.

Dumbo... makes me cry. Every single time and in the exact same spot. I just have a special affection for Dumbo.

The last person to stand still and repeat himself was Walt Disney. He refused to repeat himself. So to think that he'd be making the same kind of film in the year 2001 that he made in 1941 is absurd.

Audiences deserve better.

Everyone is looking for the sure thing. They are looking to hedge their bet. They think the way to do that is to go with a proven quantity, a remake of something you have already seen. That is their mindset.

When Tim Allen made The Santa Clause, I thought that was a delightful film. It took a modern sensibility but layered onto it a kind of sentiment.

Polar Express is not an attempt to do animation. It is a technology-based film.

Quality survives.

While it was occasionally done here or there, nobody else had a figurehead like Walt doing it. Jack Warner wasn't on TV. Walt was the boss, but he had a real public profile and he used it to his advantage. And he became a household face.

Hollywood executives believe that money is both the be-all and end-all to the moviemaking process.

NBC anchor Brian Williams is a standup comic in disguise.

Television is what made It's a Wonderful Life the classic it is today.

Beauty and the Beast became the first animated feature ever nominated for best picture.

If I were less than honest as a critic, I think people would spot that right away, and it would destroy my credibility.

Timing in life is everything.

Los Angeles has the greatest concentration of surviving movie palaces in the United States, yet most residents have never been inside one of them.

Television is what made Its a Wonderful Life the classic it is today.

It's funny, 'cause it seems like just yesterday that I was the youngest player just starting out. But now there are young players all over the league, and they'll ask me questions about playing overseas or finding an agent.

When Frank the Pug is singing I Will Survive, the only reason it's funny is that Will is in that shot trying not to get angry. A shot of a dog singing I Will Survive on its own will not get a laugh.

I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.

Robert Altman's Nashville is my all-time favorite film because it covers all the bases - it's original, moving, and has something to say, but also funny and incredibly entertaining.

You amaze me. You're 229 years old and that's what you think is funny.

You have to understand the tone of the movie, because if it's supposed to be funny, it can be funny violent like the Home Alone stuff, but you have to really understand the tone of what you're doing and make the action work for that and for the character.

It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.

Half of the great comedians I've had in my shows and that I paid a lot of money to and who made my customers shriek were not only not funny to me, but I couldn't understand why they were funny to anybody.

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.

For sheer sexiness, a man must be beautiful. Funny. yes. Clever, no.

I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

I had an idea of what I thought was funny. It's kind of based on how I am.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

When we criticize in Iran the actions of the government, the fundamentalists say that we and the Bush Administration are in the same camp. The funny thing is that human rights activists and Mr. Bush can never be situated in the same group.

So to me, Texas Hold 'em puts me to sleep. At least when you play stud, you can be funny as you deal. Somebody some day is going to come up with a Stud show that's going to work.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

Baldwin is sort of getting to be a bit funny. I don't know what happened, but a few years ago they suddenly went bankrupt and Gibson bought the whole outfit. Since then they haven't seemed to be doing an awfully good job of providing pianos.

It's funny how sometimes how the public some people think I was born like this. That I maybe I sleep and I do big muscle, but its a lot of work to look like this and to be in this kind of condition.

I think back to some of the things Harry said and some of the things I said trying to be funny. If I said them now, it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

Shirley MacLaine said, You're so funny, then gave me a hug. Everything went white. I couldn't hear, I couldn't see. I thought I was going to pass out.

I think movies glamorize violence, in the sense that they make it in a way that it's either cool or funny.

I remember interviewing someone I actually felt bad for, and therefore didn't want to take an ironic stance against him. It actually turned out to be a really funny piece.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'