“Every professional athlete owes a debt of gratitude to the fans and management, and pays an installment every time he plays. He should never miss a payment.”

Stop your grinnin and drop your linen

Slow motion is so visually cinematic; when you create that, you create it for your audience, you let them have the feeling of what it must be like to be there. And in a movie, you can’t forget the audience.

Greatness isn’t something you should always be chasing. There’s greatness within all of us, and I think that’s what we forget.

I hate tests. It’s a really lousy way to judge a person’s ability.

Through readiness and discipline, we are the masters of our fate.

We mystify the art of moviemaking, but it’s not amystical science. You take a good screenplay, put a group togetherand you hammer it out.

In the old days the studios guided your career. Now it’s all up to you.

A good filmmaker is someone who can look at a piece and go, “This camera’s really going to be a character. I want people to feel like they’re being punched.”

I never went after character payments. I’m pretty much terrible at naming characters, so I usually name them after people I know.

In FY 2006, interest payments alone on the national debt cost us $406 billion. . . . What a waste. . . .

The nature of the duties to be performed, the method of payment, the form of supervision, the tenure system, the market in which the workers find jobs, and the physical hazzards are all very different from the way things are in other occupations.

I was around when my father finished the last payment of his house.

If there was a payment to the bank due, and we needed shoes, she’d get the shoes, and then deal with them guys at the bank. I don’t mean she wouldn’t pay the bank, but the children always came first.

Even though some down payments are borrowed, it would take a large, and historically most unusual, fall in home prices to wipe out a significant part of home equity.

Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world.

It’s funny how the music industry is enraged about the Internet and the way things are copied without being paid for. But you know why people steal the music? Because they can’t afford the music.