“I’ve not made a career of being physical in my movies, but I love sports. I’m a very physical guy.”

You have respect and reverence for your characters and the fact that you’re going to epitomize that person for the rest of their lives. They’re going to be judged based on your performance by millions of people. You have a certain responsibility.

I think women can be as cruel as men, and men as tender as women, and vice versa.

I can think of films that I’m producing right now that are extremely hard-hitting, graphic films, that nobody necessarily wants to see, graphic in terms of violence, of adult content and racial and historical subject matter.

Filmmaking is a difficult process. There are the logistics of making a film. You have to do your part, and then change the entire thing around to do someone else’s part. A lot of the magic is lost, in between that, and you have to figure out how to get it back.

I owned a 1972 Plymouth Valiant that we bought for $125. It was infested with cockroaches and geckos – it was its own little ecosystem.

But I guess I like playing flawed guys ’cause it gives a place for the characters to go.

I got as much information as I could, so I wouldn’t look stupid, but this is a post 9/11 world and there’s only so much you can do with the FBI in terms of research.

I think every actor wants to be an FBI or cop at one point.

The day you stop caring what other people think of you is the day your life begins.

The only morality in a cruel world is chance.

If it helps me in the way that if this movie is successful, I get to make more films, great, and the more films that I make and the more interest that I’m allowed to cover, the better for me and the better, hopefully, for the people who like to watch me.

Well, I’ve thought many times when my career was in the toilet, that I was going to have to seriously consider getting another job, I don’t know what I’d do.

I’ve been working for many years and I think I’ve managed to work with some of the best people in the business, which has been rewarding and an apprenticeship.

A GOOD old-fashioned sex tape pretty much guarantees you a star on Hollywood Boulevard.

Directors, producers can make you look good or make you look bad.

I’d like to do more family dramas.

The biggest mistake Barack Obama could have made is to change quite a few things in his Afghanistan policy. He increased the number of troops and at the same time set the US withdrawal date to 2014.

And you wanted to hurry him up a little so you made a move, an unmistakable move; one that nobody could pretend had been a misunderstanding. And he – he ignored it – ignored you. What would you feel?

The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.

When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision.

In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.

Thousands of women are crushed and made inarticulate by that system and never develop as their natures would force them to develop were they in a decent environment.

I had a world. I don’t think I had a career. I made films.

Ah, that would be superficial indeed! In reality, those shells, which once were alive in water and are now dead and decomposed, were made thus by time not Nature.