My dad is kind of a rascal, like in a Dickensian sense. He just goes from career to career.

I'd consider myself a flailing comedy writer.

You know, 1% of us is in the armed forces, protecting the other 99, and they're all volunteers.

The only thing more intimidating than a huge international film star is your mother-in-law.

Part of your job as an artist is to push yourself and make sure your creative juices are flowing.

You learn history in school, and you have a reverential feeling toward it. But by being irreverent, it feels current.

You never can take for granted that you have a job.

You never know when you'll have a bad idea for a worse joke.

You think of George Washington, this man who was larger than life, and in some ways he was. But at the same time, he's just a person.

If it doesn't feel like a job and I'm learning something and getting that rush that I get, I don't care if it's behind a camera, on a TV set, or on the moon.

Maybe I'm naive, but I subscribe to the idea that nobody is actually making strategic decisions about their career. Trying to do that would be like playing three-card monte on Canal Street.

His story is simple, because simple is always best.

AN ABSOLUTELY VITAL FILM. Exacting, enraging and revelatory. A clear, temperate and devastating account of high level arrogance and incompetence.

An enemy of innovation could be your own sales force.

Peace the offspring is of Power.

Praise never gives us much pleasure unless it concur with our own opinion, and extol us for those qualities in which we chiefly excel.

You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans: great, big, vulgar, bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.

The biological factors underlying race differences in sports have consequences for educational achievement, crime and sexual behavior.

The last thing I want to be is a rich black superstar. I just want to act.

Blind people come to the park just to hear him pitch.

To know things as they are is better than to believe things as they seem.