I like writing because you can make things happen and turn out the way they never do in real life.

I know how sobering and exhausting parenthood is. But the reality is that our children's future depends on us as parents. Because we know that the first years truly last forever.

It's a very slow process - two steps forward, one step back - but I'm inching in the right direction.

Something is wrong here, and it's more than easy access to guns or violence on TV. It's about lack of love and attachment to loving people early in life.

Everybody talks about wanting to change things and help and fix, but ultimately all you can do is fix yourself. And that's a lot. Because if you can fix yourself, it has a ripple effect.

Every single person in jail for a violent crime had a nightmare childhood.

I like writing because you can make things happen and turn out the way they never do in real life.

I think Jews are the smartest people in the world.

We agreed that we cannot let personal political attacks get in the way of doing the very best we can for California's children.

People can be ignorant and still have loving, human qualities.

As far as getting my start, it was really Norman Lear, even aside from being on 'All in the Family.' He helped me get my start as a director. He was the one who said, 'Let him do 'Spinal Tap.' Let him give it a try,' because I had been trying for years to get that thing off the ground.

I act once in awhile if something comes up that seems fun. I like to do it - it's a lot of fun because there's no responsibility. You let other people have the headaches. The director has all of the headaches.

I acted when I was young, but at 19, I had my own theater company where I acted but also directed. I also did some theater in Los Angeles. So I was always wanting to direct, even before I became an established actor.

I don't think anybody's all good or all bad.

I don't think you should necessarily listen to a celebrity just because he is one. But if you can marshal your celebrity and really steep yourself in whatever issue you're trying to promote, it can actually move the ball forward, and we've done that.

I love it when people come up to me and they say a line. Like, you know, 'My name is Indigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.'

I love the idea of making movies that kids and adults can go to together and both get something out of it, and not just, 'Oh, I've got to take my kid to the movie because they want to see the next, you know, 'Hannah Montana' movie or whatever.'

I'd never ask an actor to do something I couldn't do - not that I'm the best actor in the world - but if I can do it, then I know that anyone I hire can do these things.

I've made movies that nobody saw initially, and then, all the sudden, people over the years pick up on it. Like 'Spinal Tap' and 'Princess Bride.'

Martin Scorsese is one of the great filmmakers of all time.

The marketing costs are insane now. So even if you've got a picture like 'Flipped' which cost under $14 million, or $13.5 million, you're still going to spend on an national basis, if you release with a good national release, you're still going to spend, you know, $30-$40 million.

The most important thing is that you be a good person and you live by the golden rule of do unto others. If you live by that, that's all I care about.

The reason they don't make movies for adults and for people which are the largest bulge of the population is because they are not usually going to the movie the first weekend. They take a while to learn about it, probably word of mouth. It takes a lot of money to release a picture.

There's not one film that I've ever made that could get made today by a studio, not one - even 'A Few Good Men' because it's an adult courtroom drama, and studios do not make them any more. And so every movie that I make, have made and will make is always going be independently financed.

We made the joke when we screened 'Bucket List' that there was 100% desire to see amongst our demographic with a 40% ability to get them to see it.

When I read 'Stand By Me,' it was like, 'This is a look back at the same time period when I was growing up, and it was about kids, but it really felt like what it was like to have those powerful feelings of friendship at age 12.' That's what got to me.

When I show up to act in a movie for somebody else, I just want to be nice and helpful and do what they want because I know how difficult it is to make a movie. I don't want to cause any problems. So you show up and do your job, and I think if a director understands that, you don't make a lot of demands.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.

Yes, I am Algerian of Moroccan origin through my parents, but all my life is Algeria. I was born there.

At one point in your life, you'll have the thing you want or the reasons why you don't.