It's a mixed crowd at the dogs - black, white, hispanic - but to Walt they all look like Jackie Gleason. Heavyset guys with big plans and polyester souls.

To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'

Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by.

I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.

I like to act. I work for scale. I don't have an acting agent. I'm in the book.

My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it's a pro-democracy film. And if George W.Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that's his problem.

I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it's true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.

Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.

The hardest thing about movies is doing take 12, 13, and 14, and finding new ways to do the same lines. So the early takes are actually easier and I think there's more surprises in them.

How you die out in me:down to the lastworn-out knot of breathyou're there, with a splinter of life.

Every conceivable layer of the election process is completely riddled with vulnerabilities, so yes, hacking elections is easy!

The adults were completely wrong.

All films are born free and equal.

It's not just about me. It's about all of us, accepting one another. We're all different... That's a good thing.

I don't know exactly where ideas come from, it's just a matter of us figuring out how to receive the ideas waiting to be heard.

Values are not just words, values are what we live by. They're about the causes that we champion and the people we fight for.

It is your duty to examine the conduct of public figures and to place them in the spotlight - that is your duty.

It's correct that I wanted health reform to do more to create choices and promote competition.

The Congress is a power-oriented party.