I started acting when I was in high school, started writing when I got to New York in 1975.

I’ve been trying to pick up painting but it’s hard.

The premise is simple: One economy and one environment, and they’re interdependent.

Success? You can’t get a big head about it. When people stare at me, they could be whispering to their friend, ‘That guy sucks! Have you seen him before? He’s horrible.’

If Beethoven and Bach hooked up with Mozart and made a band, they could be a distant runner up to The D.

Yeah, some of my college friends and I have been tinkering around for years, you know, just for fun.

We are going as fast as we can as soon as we can. We’re in a race against time, until we run out of money.

I’m an actor who they said was wrinkled and balding and everything else when I was in my early 30’s. Most of the people who wrote that who thought they were younger than me are...

I’m the guy who will eat something that looks nice when I’m out, but when I take it home in a doggie bag, it’ll sit in the back of my refrigerator until it starts to...

Trust and belief are two prime considerations. You must not allow yourself to be opinionated.

Well, obviously, as soon as I’d finished the script I read a lot of books on Winston Churchill, and started to gain weight and really prepare emotionally, mentally and physically for the role.

But then, I just decided to get off my lazy butt and take advantage of the L.A. weather.

Because if you have a strong foundation like we have, then you can build or rebuild anything on it. But if you’ve got a weak foundation you can’t build anything.

Thin people are beautiful, but fat people are adorable.

As I was coming up on the stage, there was one source that could make or break you, the New York Times. Inevitably there would be one actor singled out for a better review, or...

After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized.

The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your glass.

I give a percentage of the earnings to the Motion Picture Home.

It’s a hard call, but I’ve no desire to live my children’s lives. I think my job as a father is to protect them, to allow them a safe place to grow up and to...

So when we finally settled down outside of Seattle I felt totally uncomfortable with that idea.

I could have gone the route of a lot of these former child actors, but I didn’t want that for myself. Like I said, when I was 14 years old, I decided to quit. I...

They put it on the page because it sounded good or it looked good or they read it in a book somewhere that this is how you structure a script or something, and they just...

Love is full of anxious fears.

The prayers of cowards fortune spurns.

Everyone’s a millionaire where promises are concerned.

So the thing that’s beautiful about the Rolleiflex is that I open the camera up from the top and put my face in and that the camera’s all about composition and all about light.

I’ve been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to...

Shaft was a pop culture figure along t he lines of, I guess, Dirty Harry – except that he wasn’t as much of a racist. So yeah, I was always a fan.

People don’t want to pay 8 or 9 dollars to go see a problem that they have in their life, on screen. They pay to get away from that. That’s why they watch soap operas.

The Professional Children’s School, it’s for professional kids, so if you wanted to ditch, you could just write, Audition on a note and leave. I didn’t really like school all that much.

The writers and producers always have an idea, then they cast the role and the instrument starts to tell them how to play the music.

I don’t think you ever leave Star Trek for good.

As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don’t get to do when I’m just acting.

The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved – as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem – must stay utterly rooted in their own...

You can’t be pregnant in leotards, and this is the last chance for us to get our bodies into the shape of concert dancers and capture it with the magic of film.

We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.

I’m not the most talkative guy in the world.

I am a sensitive writer, actor and director. Talking business disgusts me. If you want to talk business, call my disgusting personal manager.

Tarantino’s stuff in its inception was all about finding a way for him to break into Hollywood.

To me, White Boy Shuffle is sort of like Catcher in the Rye, the story is so universal.

Television is so dictated by time constraints that you have to make quick decisions and go with them.

It’s exciting to think that something I’m involved in is touching so many people in so many cultures.

My acting ability would have sent me back to the post office. It was my singing that got me jobs. Ironically, now, people think of me as an actor and don’t know me much as...

I want to die in the saddle. I love writing, producing, acting, directing.

So I had to be careful. I recognized the responsibility that, whether I liked it or not, I had to accept whatever the obligation was. That was to behave in a manner, to carry myself...

Yes, I’ve written several screenplays.

I haven’t done a lot of things in my career that my kids can watch, because they are 8, 6 and 3, and they are pretty young; so given the concepts that the film was...

Then I did Japanese Death Poem. I played seven or eight different characters. It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever done on stage.

Well, our songwriting process is pretty collective.

I was a bad boy as a child.