I wonder if that's hurt me at the box office. Maybe audiences these days want to know exactly what to expect when they go into a movie, and my movies are hard to explain in just one way.

California is an island, and New York's an island. Maybe it's time for me to change islands.

Even when I begin with a situation that's basically funny or sad, I like to keep poking around in it. I like to get into the middle of a relationship, to explore the subtle places.

One thing I know is that I don't want to be a director for hire, making genre films.

Most marriages I've known, and I've been married a long time and I've known a lot of married people - you wonder how they got together. Often they seem to be opposites.

The one thing that's closest to my story is the thing about trying out for the juvenile delinquent role and getting it. That was the start of my acting career... which I've resumed, by the way.

If you cast wrong, you are in a lot of trouble.

Almost every actor goes into almost every picture very frightened. He is positive he really can't do it. The bigger the star, the more frightened he is.

I don't like movies that are morally simple.

I've rarely met couples who - they both love to do everything together.

I wish in my own mind I were more definite - that I was absolutely convinced I'd never direct someone else's script, but I keep reading scripts, because I might find something.

Nana’s oven-baked fried chicken cut off the bone (with plenty of ketchup) was a huge hit. So were Thanksgiving turkey bathed in gravy and Nana’s Passover brisket

The man spends half of his life trying, and the other half is preventing.

Walter [Cronkite] sang me a little sea chantey. The verse ended, 'Just watch your back with Dan [Rather], dear, just watch your back with Dan.'.

The more music you love, the happier you will be.

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.

Can you call a farm with a dozen geese a farm? Still, it was a little better for the Jews in Czechoslovakia. There were only two pogroms there. What's two pogroms?

It's very simple: When you're working your hardest, the world opens up to you.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

When we think about what might go wrong, we're more likely to design something that goes right.

Ours is an open and accepting society, and has historically provided an avenue for lawful immigration to all those willing to accept the responsibilities of citizenship.