Shooting clay targets is a very cleansing experience. It's very relaxing. It takes a lot of concentration. It's also very social, since you're usually shooting with friends. You can talk and forget about almost anything else that's on your mind.

Do you like my suit? I think this is an amazing suit, don't you think?

I guess after Dances With Wolves they probably tried some derivative westerns, and if they didn't work, they said the western is dead and moved on to something else.

Which to this day is a source of enormous guilt, because I left with three classes to go in the business school to sign a contract with 20th Century Fox.

I had a strong, really good upbringing, not puritanical.

If you buy an expensive thing and you never use it, I don't think there's a point to it.

Son, never throw a punch at a redwood.

It's not that conservatives don't care. We do. We just have different answers than liberals do. It's a difference of the mind, not of the heart.

I live a pretty simple life.

To me, the excitement is in ordering a fine shotgun, going through the process that everybody who has bought one has gone through for 100 years. You order it, you make a significant down payment, and then you wait three or four years for the gun to be custom-made for you.

Having had that experience... I think, what modern culture wants to see is the relationship with the woman. I don't think you can tell a story on film nowadays where the woman simply is there for the man when he decides to settle down.

I praise CBS for taking a risk, which is always the price you pay for opportunity. This is not standard movie of the week storytelling. I think movies of the week have fallen into a niche and that isn't my niche.

And besides, because of all she has accomplished, Barbara Jordan has always been a hero of mine.

I feel the other element of a western is the land, which is very important in this movie. I mean the land is another character in the piece, actually.

I've never reacted well to other people telling me what to do.

I don't feel the obligation to have a big explosion in the first 20 seconds so the audience doesn't turn on another channel. We are trying to make something that looks like a feature film that was bought for television and I think we are succeeding.

Shooting clay targets is a very cleansing experience. It's very relaxing. It takes a lot of concentration. It's also very social, since you're usually shooting with friends. You can talk and forget about almost anything else that's on your mind.

I've learned by hanging out in Hollywood, where I disagree politically with most people, that most people's hearts are in the right place, and the only thing we have to argue about is the way to solve the problems.

I think a lot of Magnum was me.

You know, there's so much imitation and so much pandering in Hollywood.

I realized I really liked the screen. I knew it was a challenge, but I wasn't afraid of risk.

It is scary for an actor when you get hired as a lead. No matter what the plot is, it is your job to do something interesting enough to make them want to get inside the lead character's head.

But, you know there's a lot of westerns - not that they were bad - it's just that they can be remade because they're great stories that aren't indelible in an audience's mind when it comes to both the cast and the story.

You know I grew up watching the TV series The Rifleman.

There was a time I could have been mistaken for Burt Reynolds. I had a moustache and so did he. But he was the number one star in the world, so there wasn't really much confusion.

Hopefully you marry someone who you not only love, but who you like as well.

I don't think you should do something just to prove to an audience that you can do it, that's way out of your wheelhouse.

I hate going to the gym, so sweating outdoors sure beats sitting on a stationary bike staring at my navel.

I quit 'Magnum' to have a family. It took a long time to get off the train, but I try very hard to have balance, and this ranch has helped me do that.

I think of myself as an actor first, not a sex symbol. Do I think I'm sexy? No, that's someone else's judgment, and I honestly don't think you can try to be sexy and really succeed.

I think television has always been one to replicate when something's successful. I don't think there's quite as much innovation.

My first priority is time with my family.

People tracking your life and photographing you anywhere you go, that can make you crazy.

The Westerns I like aren't really comedies. I'm drawn to the scope of them and the land as a central character.

At my age, turning gray is kind of a blessing, where it softens all of the other horrible things it does to you, but it is what it is.

You don't do characters that are the same as you, otherwise why bother to act?

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.