If you feel safe then you can go wherever you want to go as an actor.

As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.

I'm a control freak. Totally.

A dream that you don't fight for can haunt you for the rest of your life.

Ripe bananas are the mark of a good produce section. A good produce section is the mark of a superior grocery store. A superior grocery store is the mark of a good man.

Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk - and collect it.

The thing is, I'm a very practical filmmaker.

Sometimes we all make relationships more complicated than they necessarily have to be.

I write in the mornings. During my down time.

People wear shorts to the Broadway theater. There should be a law against that.

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

It is only the great hearted who can be true friends. The mean and cowardly, Can never know what true friendship means.

Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.

I've only had two rules. Do all you can and do it the best you can. It's the only way you ever get that feeling of accomplishing something.

The researcher is more memorable than the researched.

Whining is a form of manipulation. People will give anything to make you shut up.

You really are a badass, edgy guy who tells it like it is...about couscous.

After 87 pictures in 47 years, I knew when to quit.

To be honest, I wrote so many drafts of this book [ The Nightingale ] and changed the characters so many times; the real surprise is that I finished the book at all.

If the Royal Variety Show was put in a matter transportation machine with the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, this is what you'd get.