I don't even like to use the word relationship. I don't know what it means.

I think it's good to meet smart people and talk.

Nobody has a franchise on what is good.

I still think I'm going to do something else when I grow up.

I just don't get invited to the same dinner parties I used to like to go to.

If I don't see my kids for six days, I start to get withdrawal pains.

I don't even like to use the word relationship. I don't know what it means.

I can't talk about foreign policy like anyone who's spent their life reading and learning foreign policy. But as a citizen in a democracy, it's very important that I participate in that.

I kind of dwindled into acting.

It made me think about a whole area of human activity that was not really a concern to me before that, because I was involved in reading Chinese history, or languages, or whatever.

I started getting jobs, and I thought it was going to be real easy.

I'm a 9/11 Republican.

I do believe all actors are smart.

I had no desire from an early age to be on the stage.

Acting is not about knowing all this stuff; it's about character.

Too often in the past, U.S. leaders have forced Israel to pay the price for American strategic interests in the Middle East - through concessions in the peace process as well as passivity in the face of Iraqi attacks.

I kind of have a dilettantish spirit about me.

I think you have an obligation to be an optimist. Because if you're not, nothing will change.

It's not like I'm the most famous person in the world.

But why should I run for office and lose what little influence I have?

I've seen people with a tremendous amount of educational background in the field not turn out to be terribly good actors, and I've seen people with no education in the field turn out to be people that I admire quite a bit.

Two, I actually learned a lot of things that served me very well when it came to repeating performances on stage, because it is a craft and you do need a technique for it.

The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before.

Anyone who devotes time and attention to what makes people tick, to me, is a smart person.

Artists speak the truth to the public without fear of retribution or damage to their careers.

Then I realized that to be really good at this requires a lot of energy and concentration and skill.

I saw and I met a lot of people who were in the field. It also provided a context in which I came to respect what the actor did, because I saw how difficult it actually was to do.

Involvement in public affairs is a legitimate use of celebrity.

But some actors I have met possess an intelligence that I can only dream of. It's about character, it's about behavior. They understand things about people that I simply don't see.

In Europe, people in the arts are considered part of the intelligentsia; they are considered part of the elite.

Nothing gets a bigger laugh than when you refer to things like ethics or human rights.

For about the first ten years of my career, I wasn't terribly motivated.

If you don't think you want to go on a train and read the paper every day and work from nine to six at night, there was something about the uncertainty when I was younger which was very attractive.

I was immature the way I handled the business. I saw myself as a tribune of the people.

You have to think an awful lot about your motivations or people's behavioral intentions or what their body language can indicate or what's really going on or what makes people sometimes do, sometimes, the irrational things they do.

I never understood a word John Cassavetes said. And I think he did that deliberately.

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

I don't know of many evangelicals who want to deny gay couples their legal rights. However, most of us don't want to call it marriage, because we think that word has religious connotations, and we're not ready to see it used in ways that offend us.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

In a word, if any kind of slavery can be vindicated by the Holy Scriptures, we are already sure our making and holding the Negroes our slaves, as we do, cannot be vindicated by any thing we can find there, but is condemned by the whole of divine revelation.

It is a common temptation of Satan to make us give up the reading of the Word and prayer when our enjoyment is gone; as if it were of no use to read the Scriptures when we do not enjoy them, and as if it were no use to pray when we have no spirit of prayer.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

These things don't just come, arrive and settle like a bird picking up a few bits of crumbs. They develop. I think the best word for these things is develop. They develop because of the human beings who just happen to be there at the time.

The word 'romance,' according to the dictionary, means excitement, adventure, and something extremely real. Romance should last a lifetime.