“I feel like casting is the most important aspect of making movies.”

A friend of my mom’s was a casting director so, really as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.

You have to be kind to people. Treat them decently. There’s no excuse for not.

It’s important for me to try my hand at philanthropy because I want to leave behind a record of someone who did more than just gobble up stuff for themselves. I realized that a life lived for yourself is not much of a life.

All I do, really, is go to work and try to be professional, be on time and be prepared.

Memories, all those little experiences make up the fabric of our lives and on balance, I wouldn’t want to erase any of them, tempting though it may be.

I kinda see my current position like this: Here’s your five minutes in the toy store, so you gotta do all the good movies you can before ‘Chuck Woolery’ rings the bell.

Every single director-actor I talked to, from Warren Beatty to Clint Eastwood to George Clooney, said the biggest mistake they made is not shooting enough footage of themselves.

I feel like fame is wasted on me.

I remember back when I was a kid there was a comic strip called Plastic Man. His body was elastic and he could make his extremities as long as he wanted. As a youngster I didn’t fully appreciate. But I’m now thinking Plastic Man was probably pretty popular with the ladies.

I’m always described as ‘cocksure’ or ‘with a swagger,’ and that bears no resemblance to who I feel like inside. I feel plagued by insecurity.

There’s a lot of noise in the world, and the internet magnifies that energy.

I’m human, just like anybody else.

Just because a lot of people know something nominal doesn’t make it important. A lot of people know what a pencil sharpener is, but that doesn’t make it the most important invention of the 20th century.

There is currency to celebrity, or celebrity is a currency. You can spend it in a lot of ways, or you can squander it. You can be taxed, as well. I really started thinking long and hard about how to use that currency as long as I had it.

I try to cast really good actors and give them a chance to do their very best work, give them as much time and space as they need.

One guy told me I was a great actor, I just would never be on the cover of a magazine.

To change any aspect of our life we must be willing to change our mind… Unfortunately, that is the one thing most people are the least willing to do.

Being busy and being seen to be busy lets you off the hook. Buys you a way out of all aspects of your many roles you secretly despiselike cleaning cupboardsor entertaining your husband’s business friends.

Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.

The central aspect of worship is the feeling of being at one with God.

A whole aspect of living well, of civilization itself, is threatened with extinction.

The aspects of patriotism that hush dissent, encourage going along, and sanction comfortable distancing and compliance with what is indecent and unacceptable… those aspects are too fundamental to ignore or gloss over.

But on the other hand I believe I’m a private person too, and I enjoy that aspect of my life as well.

People do not only live on interests; they also live on beliefs, especially in very ideological areas. Unless you understand the ideological aspect of the region, you cannot understand what is happening.