“Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognize their names and faces but know nothing else about them? Why do we care what they think, what they wear, what they eat?”

Be brave enough to live creatively . . . what you’ll discover will be wonderful: yourself.

Begin challenging your own assumptions.

But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’

What I can’t completely understand is most other people’s fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies.

Don’t be upset that it takes a long, long time to find wisdom because nobody knows where wisdom can be found.

Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.

Jean Paul Sartre says in “No Exit” that hell is other people. Well, our task in life is to make it heaven. Or at least earth.

Kids are natural scientists.

As I am becoming older, the only thing that speeds up is time.

I guess in a world uncomfortable with uncertainty, an unbeliever must be an atheist, and possibly an infidel.

It’s really clear to me that you can’t hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas.

[You have to be] willing to be changed by the person you’re listening to, where you’re not just waiting for a pause so you can say your thing, but you’re actually letting them have an effect on you if they can.

I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be.

I play tennis non-obsessively. I seem to beat people I play a lot or half the time, so I guess I gravitate to people who are as bad as I am.

I’m in this wonderful position where I can do what interests me. And whatever comes along that interests me, I do. The rest of the time I bother scientists about communicating.

Whenever you wonder about yourself, look up at the stars swirling around in the heavens and just realize how tiny and puny they are.