Concentrate, don't embroider.

This mug of mine is as plain as a barn door. Why should people pay 35 cents to look at it?

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

It is up to us to give ourselves recognition. If we wait for it to come from others, we feel resentful when it doesn't, and when it does, we may well reject it.

Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.

Concentrate, don't embroider.

Acting is not an important job in the scheme of things. Plumbing is.

Acting is not the noblest profession in the world, but there are things lower than acting. Not many, mind you - but politicians give you something to look down on from time to time.

Acting to me is always reacting.

I couldn't be a director because I couldn't put up with the actors. I don't have the patience. Why, I'd probably kill the actors. Not to mention some of the beautiful actresses.

I destroyed all my geek stuff because I didn't want to be a geek, and I regret it to this day. Consumed in the geek bonfire of the vanities was a collection of autographs and letters from Peter Cushing, Spike Milligan and Frankie Howerd, the first Doctor Whos, actual astronauts, and many more.

All real capitalisms are impure hybrids, mongrels mixed with other strains.

I think everyone should read Governor William Bradford's diary.

As a filmmaker and film student, I think it's really interesting to hear what a director did and how they figured out how to do things.

I guess one of the ways that karma works is that it finds out what you are most afraid of and then makes that happen eventually.

When I got into Stanford in high school, I had some friends from school who told me that I just got in because I was black and whatnot.

At the most basic level, I appreciate writers who have something to say.

I am here before you tonight to dedicate this administration to bringing a new renaissance of neighborhood life and community spirit, a renewal of confidence in the future of our city and a revival of opportunity for all Chicago.

There's no one else I would rather have as my manager than my mom because I know that she has our best interests at heart. Sometimes, it's hard to separate manager mode from mom mode. I think as our manager, my mom will get more emotional about situations than she would if she was just our manager.

What I like is the idea of a group, even if it's just two people - the idea of solitude within a group.

Metal never goes away. It drifts in and out, but the true fans are always there for it.

I wanted to join the Army when football failed. That was my only realistic form of making an honest living.

Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities.

I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine because I couldn't find a book that talked about the reality of the situation and how we were dishonest and afraid.

Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike.

There were mornings in the make-up trailer where I'd have fits of laughter because of the extraordinary daily events of the shoot. Sometimes, it was all too much to believe. But the wildest things happened.

Tomorrow will be more hopeful than this awful piece of time we call today.

When you get to the point where you know the material so well and you know the character so well that you can just sort of play off of whoever your reader is - that's the best feeling at an audition.

I have nothing holding me back in my head at all.

We study play because life is crap. Life is crap, and it's full of pain and suffering, and the only thing that makes it worth living - the only thing that makes it possible to get up in the morning and go on living - is play.

I'm working with published authors and some very young undergraduates and lots of people in between. They are lovely people, and they can write.

Only ugliness is obscene.

During the desperate depression of the 1980s, there were no oil and gas companies without net operating losses.

You start with an idea but then so many things can happen.