“If the stuff you’re writing is not for yourself, it won’t work.”

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

You have to stay faithful to what you’re working on.

There is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love.

Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.

I dreamed of you. I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other. We found each other in the dark.

Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

Now I think all of us were born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You, you fill me up.

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

We don’t know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.

I was always tearing stuff apart to see how it worked.

There was a lot of stuff [in Rock of Ages] that had effects in it and I thought it was too smooth.

It’s one thing to mess stuff up and break stuff, but [Borat] is really pointing out the ideology of America.

I turned things that were scripted as effects into in-camera stuff, which is sexier.

In the early ’90s I was floating somewhere between the Brat Pack/Andrew McCarthy/James Spader/Pretty In Pink kind of stuff and the alterna-pop look, crossed with a very distinct grunge sensibility.

I think in the U.K. people perhaps know me for some other stuff because of my involvement with soccer and support of Tottenham.

Especially parts from ‘Star Wars’ – I can do this stuff all day long. It’s exactly how I made my living for 15 years.

If it’s a question about stuff that matters to you personally, like favorite food, favorite piece of knowledge, favorite animal, it’s hard not to have an opinion and want to quantify things.