I find that when people get a script, they know within five pages if the writer can write. Once you're five pages in, it doesn't matter whose name is on the cover, you're not even thinking about it.

Idealism loses to pragmatism when it comes to winning elections.

I was a volleyball player as a kid. I played volleyball all the time.

I have absolutely no musical talent of my own!

I don't think there is anything more bitter in American politics than a close election.

I was alone a lot as a kid, because my parents were divorced.

I love the idea of a movie hero in a thriller who is able to get ahead by just his brilliance, and not with a gun or by being an action hero.

I've found that sitting around and obsessing about projects moving forward, when there's actually nothing I can do about it, at a certain point, is really counter-productive.

Certainly, for me, and it's gone this way on every project I've worked on, the "writing" never ends until you're done with the movie.

The auditioning process is one in which the actor gets very little information about almost every element of it.

My goal isn't so much genre, or fact-based or not fact-based. I just want to work on projects that I think could be great.

I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it

I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and in children because they are people.

I'm sorry that when you say 'love', I always hear'heartbreak'.

Art is 'I'; science is 'we'.

Just in the course of an hour, people didn't need to be persuaded. They just needed to hear, oh my god, there is another plan here which is about the public interest.

This civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.

If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.

I am just another fireman because the story focuses on Joaquin Phoenix's character, but I play Joaquin's close friend and I get burned up a little bit, but I don't die.

I'm not a Republican, and I'm not a Democrat.

You cried when He took away your drop of water, not knowing He'd saved for you, the sea.