’24’ is a pretty serious show – there isn’t a lot of improv that is happening. Having said that, I do play around with the delivery. A lot of the humor comes from playing a...

I’m working on Leno. He’s from my home state, Massachusetts. And my home country, Italy. I said, ‘Hey, Jay, why don’t you have me on your show? Afraid I’ll be funnier than you?’

When I was larger, people said I was fat. Now that I’ve lost weight, they say I died.

I always said your best palate is your own, not mine. I’m a guidepost.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a a hundred times, I’m forty-four years old.

A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.

‘Crash’ came from personal experience. I saw things inside me from living in L.A. that made me uncomfortable. I saw horrible things in people and saw terrible things in myself. I saw a black director...

We approached Yahoo and Jerry Yang and said that Hadoop is going to continue to be popular, and as it does, more and more of your team is going to get poached by other companies...

I always want to set myself a challenge by doing something no-one would expect me to do! But, having said that, I don’t feel as a musician you can steer too far away from what...

I wouldn’t listen to my parents, but I found out that I absorbed. I never heard what they said – told me – but I did what they did.

I think President Karzai realizes exactly how important it is to strengthen the fight against corruption in the country now, step up endeavors to stop the drug trade and to deliver better governance. He said...

When it comes to relationships, it’s nice to have something that is your own and not everyone else’s. That’s not part of my job. I never stood up on a podium and said, ‘Vote for...

When the Canadian confederation took place in 1867, a lot of people in Quebec said, ‘Could we have a referendum?’ They said, ‘Oh, no. In the British tradition, the Parliament can do anything, excluding changing...

As Oscar Wilde should have said, when bad ideas have nowhere else to go, they emigrate to America and become university courses.

I never planned my career. I never planned to be president of Harvard. People would have thought I was crazy, probably, at the age of 8 or 10 or 20, if I had said that....

Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, ‘Chess is life.’ I would say, ‘Pi is life.’

To see him there lifeless and breathless was very emotional for me. But I held myself together because I knew he’s very much alive in his spirit, and that was just a shell. But I...

I express things through characters because I have a fear that my own voice is irritating because that’s been said to me.

There is the expression of selfishness and there is the expression of selflessness – but economists or theoreticians never touched that part. They said: ‘Go and become a philanthropist.’ I said, ‘No, I can do...

They say now in America that final cut doesn’t mean anything. As Harvey Weinstein said to some film-maker, ‘You can have final cut. I’ll open your film in Arkansas.’

At ‘Women’s Wear’, I always said, ‘Get it first – get the bacon.’

Kentucky has always said you can’t really make bourbon outside of Kentucky because it’s a combination of the barrels and the limestone-fed springs that give us the water. That’s our story, and we’re sticking to...

I said what I said before Congress because I meant every word of it.

When I said I was going to audition for a film, I got a hearty laugh from all my family.

When they searched my car, they said that they found a gasoline canister and I think duct tape. Who wouldn’t have a gasoline canister on them when driving 3,000 miles across country?

One of the towering people in this industry said, why don’t you go and make a five-year contract with somebody, make yourself several million dollars and put it away, then go and do whatever you...

I did all the right things in so many tournaments. But like I said, sometimes in sports it just goes the other way. Maybe you’ve already won so much that it evens it out a...

I suppose I had my rock star fantasies while I was singing into my hairbrush in the bathroom mirror, but I never really consciously said, ‘OK, this is what I’m going to do for a...

I always hated when the studios just kind of said that anybody can act. You look at people like Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda – and I’m just talking about the male actors – there aren’t...

Well even before she was diagnosed with the cancer, I would have said that she was a lot tougher than me and most guys would probably say that about their wives and it’s probably true...

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

I took the first James Kelman novel, ‘The Bus Conductor Hines’, home to my dad. I thought, ‘My dad will like this; it’s written in Scots.’ But my dad said: ‘I can’t read that.’ He...

I hate fame. There’s this assumption that everyone wants it – that by being a musician, I’ve signed up for it at some point. But personally, what I signed up for is sharing my music....

Oprah Winfrey gives you the stage? Shut your mouth. I said, ‘I’m sorry for taking over your show.’ She said, ‘No, that’s why we have you here.’

When I first played the guitar without plugging it into an amplifier, the people at Fender were blown away. They couldn’t believe the sound. I said, ‘See, gentlemen, the world is no longer flat.’

What we’re doing is making sure that we have a safe and secure border region from San Diego all the way to Brownsville. And that means manpower, it means technology, it means infrastructure, it means...

There are things that once done can’t be undone, things that once said can’t be unsaid.

My grandmother, when she looked at American movies, she said, ‘They’re all the same. In the first scene somebody shoots somebody and then everybody makes phone calls.’

They did is sent me down Clearwater, Florida, and they said to me, Jessica, I need you to make Jim Bakker feel better.

Even my closest friend said I was finished, but I think I may be a little different from the others.

‘Miracle at St. Anna.’ I was challenged by Spike Lee. When he offered me the film, he looked me square in the eye and said, ‘You start this film off and you end this film....

Nobody minded what you did in bed or what you said about God, a very civilized attitude in 1948.

The pressure isn’t on my brain, but on my mouth. I realized Sam Malone said very little, he spoke in little sentences. Which is much more comfortable for me for some reason.

After the Fukushima disaster, Japan shut down most of its reactors and said it would move to renewables.

I started doing some demos and got online and bought a refurbished laptop, bought a microphone off of eBay. A lot of folks said you can’t really do it that way at a pro level,...

If somebody actually came to me and said, ‘O.K., this is it: write your last ‘South Park’ episodes,’ I’d be like, ‘No, no, no.’

I love Forever 21. A friend of mine introduced it to me when I was in New York. I was borrowing a dress and said, ‘Where’s that from?’ and she said, ‘Oh, it’s Forever 21,’...

You know Sarkozy offered me the Legion d’honneur medal? I refused. People said I refused because I don’t like Sarkozy, but that’s ridiculous. I refused because I don’t like decorations – except on women.

I phoned this number and said, Please, sir, I want to be an actor.

I say the same thing that I’ve said for decades now, which is: don’t go over to Japan trying to change it, thinking that you know better. Go there trying to understand.