You don't get to pick your partners in families; you get assigned a seat at the table.

Cat lovers turn into cat collectors.

When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

Part of filmmaking is always a guessing game, and part of it is always a game of trust.

She is such a scene-stealer. She's got these lashes and big eyes, and when she walks on to the set everybody just says "ooh."

I don't consider a lot of actors that I really admire movie stars.

I was just a quiet kid, really. I wasn't the class clown at all.

If you're working on a movie, you want it to be projected on the largest tapestry possible, and the sound to be perfect, and for that kind of communal experience of the movies to take place for it.

I really don't make a concerted effort to try to find a type of role.

I've never had a clear road map. When things come along, I benefit.

I can't not find humor in elements of most parts of life, but at the same time nothing ever seems perpetually funny to me.

Vanity dies hard, in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

To avoid entangling alliances has been a maxim of our policy ever since the days of Washington, and its wisdom no one will attempt to dispute.

I think I think, therefore I think I am.

In all countries where nature does the most, man does the least.

My future will not copy my fair past, I wrote that once. And, thinking at my side my ministering life-angel justified the word by his appealing look upcast to the white throne of God.

Men's happiness or misery is [for the] most part of their own making.

The truest protest is beauty.

Economic research demonstrates that tax dollars spent in early childhood development provide extraordinary return on investment-16% for high quality programs

There were times when it would have been easy to fall apart or to go in the opposite direction, but somehow I felt that if I took on more step, someone would come along to join me.

I was planning on going to Yale to theater school.