If I stay alert, then I can challenge myself, and by challenging myself, that helps me to stay alive and to hopefully take something away from the experience.

I spent a lot of years just learning my craft and falling down in front of the camera.

I'm a really huge fan of the old romantic comedies from the '30s and '40s... Huge fan. I love all that stuff.

I'm of the mind that life is a risk, every time you leave your house it's a risk, and I see no reason to go through life with my hands tied behind my back for any reason. I'd be foolish to let something stop me from doing what I love to do.

My dad was an entrepreneurial businessman, and maybe I got some of his ability.

I think what makes us human - is our interconnectedness among people. It's our ability to form and maintain relationships. It's the barometer by which we call ourselves human.

Some of the supporting roles that I've done as an actor, I took them because I knew that I would get to watch some of the leading guys in the movies, and also I'd get to work with them.

I'm interested in people that don't always do the right thing, its much more akin to what I know about life.

I still collect comics. I still have a great love and respect for the genre.

It's not that the film is violent, it's that people have an issue with violence right now.

To me, it's the kiss of death when you start winking at the audience as an actor. I just never liked it. I don't like it when we do monologues, looking into the character.

If I stay alert, then I can challenge myself, and by challenging myself, that helps me to stay alive and to hopefully take something away from the experience.

I'm interested in the impact my movies have on people and how it affects them, and what they like and what they don't like - and what they take away from it. What leaves an impression, you know?

Harrison Ford - one of my favorite actors - has a wonderful sense of character and depth and uniqueness to him, yet he's able to just deliver the lines without putting any English on it.

I just have a respect for my audience. That seems to be pretty logical.

I can't stand to see myself act. It just makes me cringe.

To stand there and do nothing on film is probably the hardest thing to do.

It's kind of true that they just start making the same movie over and over again. It's also true that the times dictate what kind of movies get made and what kind are not. So I'm always looking for something that's a little fresh and something that I haven't seen before.

Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the '50s and '60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.

I want to make movies that I want to see, and what I miss and I'm not seeing.

Earlier on in my career I felt that I had to hide behind a lot of different masks, and showboat ways of performing. Now, that's a lie. The less I have to hide, the less I have to act.

People lose people, we lose things in our life as we're constantly growing and changing. That's what life is is change, and a lot of that is loss. It's what you gain from that loss that makes life.

Great directors turn in mediocre work, and first-time directors turn in exceptional work. No matter how good a person can talk about what he wants, you never know. You just have to go with a good story and a script that you like and people that you like to work with.

I think all good drama is funny. All the best drama is ultimately very funny. Life is funny. You can't have any honest treatise on life without bumping into some humor.

Sharing the same vision for what's on the page is always a good idea. The director's job is to establish what that is and make sure that everyone sticks to it when it comes down to actually executing it. Establishing what the vision is and being able to stick to it is the job, and everyone should be on the same page going in.

Some days are more intense and quiet, and then other days, you feel more relaxed and are able to open up on set. It just depends on what you're doing that day. I like to imagine that all the choices you make during the day that you're doing a particular scene are going to feed into the creation of that scene.

We're in the doing business, or acting business and creating business. We're not in the results business, so we don't have any control over what the result is. My reward comes in the doing of it.

Conformity is painful. You know its too tight. Conformity leads to rebellion. So a desire for happiness is in direct conflict with a desire for freedom.

Conformity is painful. You know, it's too tight. Conformity leads to rebellion. So a desire for happiness is in direct conflict with a desire for freedom.

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.

To do the Ozzfest again would be great. I'd like to finish with a final Sabbath album. You always feel that it is still a challenge.

People are not perfect... very often the relationships that are strongest are those where people have worked through big crises, but they've had to work through them. So the challenge to us is to work through that.

Every single book is a challenge.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

The lopsided attitudes of college professors pose a serious challenge to learning because students are so susceptible to becoming lopsided sheep.

I really enjoy comedy. It's a real challenge.

I had a hard time with that hockey. I hadn't grown up skating, so that was my biggest challenge. We worked on it and worked on it. But then when we first shot it, it was so hard for me.

The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.

Change can either challenge or threaten us. Your beliefs pave your way to success or block you.

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

I'd say that it's important for music to be there that gives you a challenge, that rearranges things in your head.

I like good stories. Quality products and character are what's important. Even if the script isn't that strong, if I challenge myself with a great character, I'll go for it.

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

I'm not looking to set a standard... but, I believe I have offered a challenge to others with my work.

If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn't worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality. And to me, sailing the open ocean is a real challenge, because it's life or death.

And, I'd never done Tennessee Williams, and I had done Broadway musicals, so it was a challenge.

When you remove the risk, you remove the challenge. When you remove the challenge, you wither on the vine.

After Land I wanted to continue exploring the theme but I needed a new challenge so turned to colour. I explored Bradford and produced a series of urban landscapes that I liked, but because Land had made such an impact on the general public my colour work wasn't reviewed.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.