“I’ll accept bad taste in a minute, as long as there’s some great comedy minds and performances.”

I was in the army, and to me it was like a newsreel.

I’m rather secular. I’m basically Jewish. But I think I’m Jewish not because of the Jewish religion at all.

A lot of music is mathematics. It’s balance.

If presidents can’t do it to their wives, they do it to their country.

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.

We’re all blessed with a lot of timidity and a lot of worry and anxiety, and vanity is a good antidote.

Judd Apatow is pretty good, both as a producer and as a director.

I don’t believe in this business of being behind, better to be in front.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

The brilliance of Max Brooks is that he always quotes authorities at the back of his books that never existed. Like a Russian professor he made up that validates a story or character.

He who hesitates is poor.

Immortality is a by-product of good work.

As far as songwriters, I’ve always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; those guys mean a lot to me.

There’s an army story in me, and I think there’s a WWII Brooks film somewhere.

I know how to make it a great musical. I’ve got to. It’s like I’ve got to see it on stage.

I like Chris Rock. He’s dangerous.

If the West wants to have peace, then they have to accept Islamic rule.

As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.

Islam’s laws are fixed and that is why Islam is stable.

An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet.

An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer.

Accept every blind date you can get, even with a girl who wears jeans. Maybe you can talk her out of them.

Happiness depends on how you accept, understand and surrender to situations.

An author accepting language’s invitation to dance steps onto the floor of his her sensibility-charged consciousness and begins to move instinctively–even if with much dread