“If the United States is to produce a nation of investors-as we must if we are to gain financial world-leadership-it is imperative that boards of directors be so constituted as to adequately represent the interests and inspire the complete confidence of investors of moderate substance.”

I have never seen people who could do real work except under the stimulus of encouragement and enthusiasm and the approval of the people for whom they are working.

The real friend is he or she who can share all our sorrow and double our joys.

What you have outside you counts less than what you have inside you.

Some people are so methodical that that is all they are or ever will be.

An idea, like a machine, must have power applied to it before it can accomplish anything.

Without self-respect there can be no genuine success. Success won at the cost of self-respect is not success ? for what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own self-respect.

The man who is cocksure that he has arrived is ready for the return journey.

I have known not a few men who, after reaching the summits of business success, found themselves miserable on attaining retirement age. They were so exclusively engrossed in their day to day affairs that they had no time for friend making.

The Bible says, ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’ Have you a vision? And are you undeviatingly pressing and pushing toward its accomplishment? Dreaming alone will not get you there. Mix your dreams with determination and action.

He who has faith has… an inward reservoir of courage, hope, confidence, calmness, and assuring trust that all will come out well – even though to the world it may appear to come out most badly.

Plan your work – work your plan

Kill time and you will kill your career.

The truth doesn’t hurt unless it ought to.

In the race for success, speed is less important than stamina.

Think not of yourself as the architect of your career but as the sculptor. Expect to have to do a lot of hard hammering and chiselingand scraping and polishing.

Bragging often precedes begging.

I have great respect for directors who know what they’re doing.

I’d like [Santa Claus] to give Wes Anderson, the director, enough money in his next budget for an aerial shot – just a little copter shot. He really wanted this one helicopter shot, and Disney wouldn’t give him the money. Just wouldn’t give him the money.

When you trust your director completely, then you can relax, be spontaneous, be malleable.

My height can be a problem. A lot of directors and photographers are sometimes not happy because I’m pretty tall and especially if I work with short actors the difference can be pretty massive.

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

Whatever talent I had, I’m sure it helped that my parents were in the business and that I grew up around actors, comedians and directors.

In cinema, the leading player is the director.

For us, as actors, and even for the director, it gave us a sense of authenticity to what we were doing because we were talking about Hollywood and we were in Hollywood.