If you’re honest with yourself as a writer, trying to tell the best story you can, your story will be an honest one. And your values will come out, no matter how hard you try to disguise them.

Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells

I get heartbroken flying into L.A. It's just this feeling of unspecific loss. Can you imagine what the San Fernando Valley was when it was all wheat fields? Can you imagine what John Steinbeck saw?

If criticism had any power to harm, the skunk would be extinct by now.

[ on the "tropicalization" of intellectual property laws ] To make the digital world join in the samba.

Everything revolves around the fork.

It's not the art, it's the heart. What [God] reads during our worship is the inner attitude. Worship is spiritual; it's organic; it's relational.

Everybody knows that you've been faithful, give or take a night or two.

I spent 30 years of my life not being wanted at all for films.

If I see someone I'm in awe of I'm like, 'Oh my God. Oh. My. God.' But on the outside I'm very calm. I'd never run up and hassle anyone.

Unless a man believes in himself and makes a total commitment to his career and puts everything he has into it - his mind, his body, his heart - what's life worth to him?