“The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed.”

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.

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.

It’s too bad I’m not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.

It’s nice to have more time to work on the character, and to have big scenes to play. But if there’s something playable there, and if it’s interesting to do, then that’s nice.

I’m most at home on the stage. I was carried onstage for the first time when I was six months old.

It’s not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It’s a picture of somebody trying to figure things out.

Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

They wont all lie to you but a lot of them will. And itll be the easiest lie they ever had to tell to get your votes.

I really don’t like plays or movies that service propaganda.

Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.

A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

I didn’t realize I was in an awkward phase when I was in an awkward phase. It was when I was between the ages of 9 and 11. I was homeschooled.

I think its the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really cant be this way.

We have found a direct correlation between grit and positive emotions, but the fact that I have no evidence that grit is bad for you doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s always a possibility that in the future researchers will discover a downside to grit.

Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and poor countries of the world.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

The struggle between social classes and the history of ideologies. In general, intellectual movements closely reflect the trends of economic developments.