Civil liberties, good. Lawyers, bad.

What am I grateful for? Aside from my own great life, you mean? I'm just grateful that my wife, and daughter, and dogs are all healthy.

If you tell a lie that's big enough, and you tell it often enough, people will believe you're telling the truth, even if what you're saying is total crap.

The truth will set you free...unless you want to know the truth about who killed JFK.

Anybody who thinks there's not a vast right-wing conspiracy in this country must also think that Ken Starr should be our next ambassador to Luxembourg.

I've known Chevy Chase for so long, I actually knew him when he was funny!

It's this patronizing thing that people have about if you're against the war everyone's lumped together. You know, the soldiers are not scholars, they're not war experts.

Do you know what happens when you play a country song backwards? You get your wife back, your dog back and your job back.

Fate was funny that way

Embrace the notion of venturing beyond your own limits.

There are defeats more triumphant than victories.

The Iranian government as a whole has no relationship with my films. They're not particularly interested, perhaps this kind of cinema is not very interesting to them.

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion! What feminism does not need, it seems to me, is an endless recycling of Doris Day Fifties clichés about noble womanhood.

Curators are great, but they're inherently biased. Curators are always making an editorial decision. Those biases have really big implications.

This is worse than Hollywood, he thought. A girl comes in with a pork chop and I write a song for her.

All cultural explorers. . . start off from specific roots which color their vision and define the allegiances of the work of art they produce.

Back when the country was strong, back before Elvis and before the Vietnam war came along.