“When I look up at the screen and see myself I always have to laugh. Not because I think I’m doing a horrible job, quite the contrary, I just feel it’s so surreal to feel like one person can entertain so many at one time.”

A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you a reason he can’t. Either way a sale is made, the only question is: Who is gonna close?

I feel things more deeply anything to do with kids. It just makes a big difference in my life Having a child is like taking the deepest core vulnerable aspect of myself, reaching in and taking it outside of my body.

I don’t go back and look at the monitor between every take; I wait until I feel like we finally got it right: “Let me stop and look at that last one on the monitor.”

There’s something really great and romantic about being poor and sleeping on couches.

You’re basically the sum of all the experiences you’ve ever had, and they’re sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

How about the more than 1 billion Muslim people in the U.S, who aren’t fanatical, who don’t punch women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches, and pray five times a day?

My professional success is really important to me, and my career is really important to me. It’s the most important thing to me outside of my family. I take it very seriously and work really, really hard at it. Family comes first, but this is something that’s really important to me too.

My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I’m 31-years-old, and I don’t want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It’s humiliating.

I want to thank my wife who I don’t normally usually associate with Iran. I want to thank you for working on our marriage for 10 Christmases. It’s good. It is work, but it’s the best kind of work, and there’s no one I’d rather work with!

God help me if I ever do another movie with an explosion in it. If you see me in a movie where stuff is exploding you’ll know I’ve lost all my money.

When you hire great actors, you’re lucky, so you just try to create an atmosphere where they can succeed and relax and take risks. You’re happy that you get to watch them at the monitor and that your name is on the director’s chair.

I’m not the most loathsome man in the world. I’ve dropped to number nine.

I’m sure I can make a movie that doesn’t feel like a seventies movie! But the truth is, that’s my favorite era in American filmmaking. To me, those were the great years.

Its not who you love. Its how.

Marriage hasn’t been my thing. But gay people, knock yourselves out!

I like acting for myself as a director. I act and I know that I’ll have a chance to have some say in what gets used and that I’ll be able to give myself enough takes and be on the same page as myself about how the scene should play.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom.

Mutual caring relationships require kindness and patience, tolerance, optimism, joy in the other’s achievements, confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain.

Success, like happiness, is the unexpected side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.

A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

There are things one must do for oneself.