“I don’t want to die without scars.”

My happiest moment is the day they call wrap and I’m free. I’m not looking back.

I keep hearing I’m a crazy party guy. I’m not. I’m boring. At least by party standards.

I’m actually very snobbish about directors. I have to say no all the time. ‘No’ is the most powerful word in our business. You’ve got to protect yourself… To leave home, it’s got to be worth leaving. It’s got to be worth it.

What’s valuable to me has become clearer as I’ve got older. To me, it’s about the value of your time and your day and the value of the people you spend it with.

Each misstep leads to the next correct step.

Let us be the ones who say we do not accept that a child dies every three seconds simply because he does not have the drugs you and I have. Let us be the ones to say we are not satisfied that your place of birth determines your right for life. Let us be outraged; let us be loud; let us be bold.

We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession.

The things you own end up owning you.

It’s a lovely experience walking around a museum by yourself.

Success is a beast. And it actually puts the emphasis on the wrong thing. You get away with more instead of looking within.

Fatherhood is the best thing I ever did. It changes your perspective. You can write a book, you can make a movie, you can paint a painting, but having kids is really the most extraordinary thing I have taken on.

When I was a boy, I would ask about my family history, about my bloodlines. We really didn’t know that much. We had a little Indian in us from the Oklahoma Trail of Tears.

You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you.

I’m probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don’t think anyone really knows. You’ll either find out or not when you get there, until then there’s no point thinking about it.

If someone wants to do drugs … as long as he or she isn’t corrupting minors or driving under the influence or endangering others, shouldn’t a person have that right?

I look and there’s our boy from Vietnam and our daughter from Ethiopia, and our girl was born in Namibia, and our son is from Cambodia, and they’re brothers and sisters, man. They’re brothers and sisters and it’s a sight for elation.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.

To be willing to die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.

If it wasn’t for baseball, I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery. I have the same violent temper my father and older brother had. Both died of injuries from street fights in Baltimore, fights begun by flare-ups of their tempers.

To finish is sadness to a writer — a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Until the day she died, my mother continued to fight for the rights of women. She joined all the women’s movements of the time; she stirred up a lot of revolts. She was a great woman, a great figure. Women today would like her immensely.

All life was a breath exhaled by God. All dying was a breath inhaled by God.