We've got people looking at our seamy side and our sad side a lot of the time because that's easier. It's much more difficult to make a film about happiness with lots of jokes in it.

Its unfortunate and I really wish I wouldn't have to say this, but I really like human beings who have suffered. They're kinder.

Being disabled should not mean being disqualified from having access to every aspect of life.

I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.

I hate the way market forces try to separate us out in to the appropriate demographic - basically in order to sell us things. We need to find stories that we can enjoy together, not separately.

Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening.

I was brought up by very witty people who were dealing with quite difficult things: disease and death... I was brought up by people who tended to giggle at funerals.

Maybe I don't take myself so seriously any more. And I don't care how I'm judged. I'm past all that.

You can't imagine what satisfaction can be gotten from throwing a pie into someone's face.

When husbands and fathers leave, their wives and daughters tend to value themselves less as a result.

During an election, it's like they're doing my job: they're going around banging the drum for their party and selling their movie. You know, it's the same thing.

Is there a magical age when children become parents to their parents?

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.

Our true nature is free of any and all notions of gender, of any notions of difference whatsoever.

Of all the definitions of love that abound in our universe, a special favorite of mine is... “the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”

It would be great if all the fast-food outlets, slaughterhouses, these laboratories and the banks who fund them exploded tomorrow.

If you search everywhere, yet cannot find what you are seeking, it is because what you seek is already in your possession.

Compassion is where peace and justice kiss

And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry.

I think somehow I got a sense of the foolishness of the human - my favorite phrase, the foolishness of the human condition.

A war must be avoided at all costs. Russia is against any type of use of external force.