Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge.

Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can't celebrate humanity but I'm not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

The ability to take pleasure in one's life is a skill and is a kind of intelligence.

When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It's in real life that people are over the top.

So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

Usually the audience has no idea that the censored version of whatever movie they're watching isn't the original.

Casting is everything. If you get the right people they make you look good.

Part of it has to do with this business of being approached in public. I have a distinctive look - it's partly the glasses I wear - and people seem to remember me once they've seen me.

And that's just what I'm saying. I would never want to be like certain people, who change the way they dress, go out in disguise, wear a big floppy hat and dark shades. I would hate that.

In particular, people have trouble understanding where I stand in relation to my characters, and very often this gets reduced to me making vicious fun of them.

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.

Storytellers, by the very act of telling, communicate a radical learning that changes lives and the world: telling stories is a universally accessible means through which people make meaning.

Curiosity doesn't matter anymore. These days people don't want to be transported to emotional territories where they don't know how to react.

Social welfare is the most corrosive behavioral force ever unleashed by man.

What have I earned from you, Valek? Loyalty? Respect? Trust?" "You have my attention. But give me what I want, and you can have everything.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

As long as I have a good time, the audience usually has a good time.

Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent.