I love the idea of a super villain that doesn't wear a cape, that doesn't wear a super suit.

You have to keep surprising your audience.

I always have humour in my action movies. I think characters that make jokes under fire are more real. It somehow helps put you in their shoes.

The only way you can stay on top is to remember to touch bottom and get back to basics.

Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain.

An action film can have too much action; picture an equaliser on a stereo, with all the knobs pegged at 10. It becomes a cacophony and is, ultimately, quite boring.

I have these guilty pleasures, these failed films that don't work at all, but I'll watch them if they're on. Like 'The Game'.

Once I started selling scripts for a great deal of money - action scripts, no less, which people tend to pooh-pooh anyway - then I started to get some backlash. Which I didn't mind.

I think it's very admirable, in a superhero movie, to be able to take a few risks.

I wrote all the time, but the idea of doing it professionally seemed like pie in the sky. Who gets paid to write? I grew up in Pittsburgh, so it wasn't really a notion that a lot of people pursue.

I wanted at one point to act, which is a weird thing for men to want to do. It's a very vain profession.

The trees are a thousand times taller than me, and hundreds of years older, and the rocks and leaves and plants and animals never do anything silly like kill each other or fall in love or grow up.

Nobody ever forgets where he buried a hatchet.

Forgetfulness - a gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.

I always listen, I ask children, I even ask adults in tennis, "What are your children playing?" And most of the time it's not tennis. It's pathetic.

Happiness is not an end - it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence.

For a while, it was something to try to push at people, playing old murder ballads and being upset about everything I was seeing around me. But now I feel a lot more at peace with it.

Despite the obvious benefits, many Americans do not like Texas. Some even say they despise Texas, and make no secret of their feelings.

I could hear you, talking to the daffodils and tulips, whispering to the fairies that lived inside their petals. Each separate flower had a different family inside it.

Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.

Whatever we accomplish is due to the combined effort.