“Religion has really spawned some monsters. It always has, historically. Go all the way back to the Inquisition, you know, the Crusades, the Jehad and so on.”

Mythology can be used, and has been used, even to re-state, you know, the very urgent problems of the world.

A human feast is an indifferent morsel to a god.

When I say war, I’m not talking about mental war; I’m talking about totally eliminating the obstacles to transformation of our children.

There’s a lot of insincerity about the actions of our legislators; they create distractions – like this anti-gay law you alluded to – and try to mobilise, to exacerbate people’s emotions. Until the legislators started making laws, people minded, generally, their own business.

I don’t know any other way to live but to wake up everyday armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.

I can look violence in the face and either reject or accept it.

Romance is the sweetening of the soul With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.

We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.

Intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it’s the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance.

My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience.

Governance can dig itself into a huge hole and not even know it’s in there.

I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.

The writer is the visionary of his people… He anticipates, he warns.

Well, some people say I’m pessimistic because I recognize the eternal cycle of evil. All I say is, look at the history of mankind right up to this moment and what do you find?

I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we’d never smelled the fumes of petroleum.

You accept whoever you are interacting with, directly, or indirectly.

Certain people always say we should go back to nature.I notice they never say we should go forward to nature.

Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one’s own need to think.

There’s a Washington standard of casually putting things off the record. It’s really gone too far. I don’t know an easy way to turn it back.

That has a continuous and robust inspection mechanism and that has snap-back provisions in case Iran violates the agreement.

Normally, you have all this knowledge from all the films that you’ve done that you’ve accumulated over the years

” What do you mean? What you mean is that they want to look back in history. And so I think it’s only natural for entertainment to reflect that.

And you can constantly look back when you’re in some sort of fix and say, “Well, on so-and-so film, we did this, and it worked out fine.”

I remember once having to stop performing when I thought an elderly man a few rows back from the front was actually going to die because he was laughing so hard.