I’ve always thought that as long as directors and casting directors don’t see me as just Harry Potter, I’ll be OK. People have shown a lot of faith in me, and I owe them a...

The essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of the hero.

Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.

I have to be entertained by what I’m writing, so a lot of my stuff has a goofiness or scatological quality. If these characters can entertain me, then I feel like I can deal with...

Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody.

I think a lot of people are getting more serious about how to do the most good, but there is no road map. I’m hoping I can offer an example.

I want to give my six hours of serious cricket on the ground and then take whatever the result.

Love may be harder to find in some people, but when they do love you know it must be something marvelous.

Being a public servant, this is a serious job, not like a boxer, you’re entertaining people.

Serious journalism need not be solemn.

I think the state has some serious problems. Just look at the layoffs going on across the state, not just in Chicago. It affects the middle class. It pushes people down.

If I could only teach you one thing about the world, it would be to Appreciate and be as present as possible in every moment. Take everything in and try and learn from it. No...

You can only do so many serious dramas in a row before you want to break. You want a change.

In those days I was mortified, because I was a serious actor in my own mind, and then all of a sudden I’m this hunk.

Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.

I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people – to take them through the argument by...

I’d have to say that my favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning. ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ is like that. That’s my fave genre, if I had to pick one.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of...

I was having serious issues with becoming a diabetic.

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.

I used to think that: whenever I heard that someone had taken 10 years to write a novel, I’d think it must be a big, serious book. Now I think, ‘No – it took you...

You all have your own distinct personal backgrounds. Of course some of you come from rich families, some from poor families. But circumstances beyond your control like that shouldn’t determine who you are. You must...

Global new money has houses everywhere, and serious helicopters, it doesn’t aspire to the Miss Marple life of St. Mary Mead.

I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

Certain things are extremely difficult to understand, such as the concept of unconditional love, perhaps it is due to mislead thoughts about God’s love for us. Assuming that we can say or do certain things...

I don’t want to talk in terms of miracles. I think this is a very serious situation. But I do want to talk in terms of Bush becoming a man of the hour, and I...

I can be quite serious sometimes so laughing is key.

The word ‘leukemia’ is a very frightening word. In many instances, it’s a killer and it’s something that you have to deal with in a very serious and determined way if you’re going to beat...

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.

Play so that you may be serious.

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

‘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....

There is a line between scurrilous nonsense and serious discussion that laps over, especially in this day and age when you’ve got all this electronic media and these blogs and this kind of fanatical impulse...

But ya have to make videos in the States. Usually ours just look too serious. We haven’t got it together.

Someone has to be stoic, for the sake of, in spite of, and in the face of all those who are, not. Someone, has to be serious. Someone has to choose to forgo choice, so...

I’m good at keeping secrets, but if it’s not something super serious I usually tell people not to tell me because I’ll tell someone else.

I had a serious childhood illness – sort of like spinal meningitis – that led to a three-month hospitalization. Afterward, I couldn’t be insured because of a pre-existing condition.

Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does...

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it’s much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

I really feel free and not as serious as I have been in the past.

I can be really silly, but I never get to do that. I’m always playing on-the-nose characters, professionals – lawyers, a serious news anchor, people with a really focused energy, which can become a cliched...

I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood – sex and the dead.

There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.

In the ’70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.

It’s too bad that there aren’t as many light comedies around in the movies as there were when I was making pictures like ‘The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.’ The boys are just not writing them....

There’s only so far you can take a relationship before you got to get into things that are too serious or over the top.

To be a great writer, you must be nomadic. I’d recommend the hunter/gatherer lifestyle for anybody serious about being nonsensical.

You think that the heads of state only have serious conversations, but they actually often begin really with the weather or, ‘I really like your tie.’

Real writers – serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it – all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms...

I didn’t pretend to know Eli at all, but even so, I’d noticed that his manner was slightly hard to read. It was something in the way he talked that made it difficult to tell...