I think if you make a good movie, people walk away arguing.

In America there’s no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

If you’re performing music that is not who you are or where you’re at, it is painful. It’s painful for the performer and for the audience.

‚Be Cool‘ was a defining movie for me.

Our life before moving to Washington was filled with simple joys… Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at grandma’s house… and a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn’t stay awake for both.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

Theology is unnecessary.

It’s simple: You get a part. You play a part. You play it well. You do your work and you go home. And what is wonderful about movies is that once they’re done, they belong to the people. Once you make it, it’s what they see. That’s where my head is at.

I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I’d ever have any interest in filmmaking.

It’s hard work making movies. It’s like being a doctor: you work long hours, very hard hours, and it’s emotional, tense work. If you don’t really love it, then it ain’t worth it.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

‚Unforgiven‘ is probably an example of a script that I liked right away but thought, ‚This is great, but I’d like to do this when I’m older.‘ So I stuck it in the drawer for ten years and then took it out.

If you can’t answer a man’s arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.

I’ve got a great sense of humor, and if I’m able to say or do something in a movie that people feel like they want to repeat, that’s hugely flattering.

Sometimes I’d like to play the bad guy and sometimes I’d like to die in a movie.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

It is one thing to record an album but it’s a huge difference when people play it and listen to it and embrace it the way that I do. It has always been my dream to get my music out to the world and have people hear it.

If the boy and girl walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last scene, it adds 10 million to the box office.

On ‚Think Like a Man,‘ they got the best out of me because they allowed me to bring my own cadences and opinions to the character that I was playing. I think we got the best of that particular character.

The most propagandistic element of ‚Frozen‘ was the transformation of the prince at the beginning of the story, who was a perfectly good guy, into a villain with no character development whatsoever about three-quarters of the way to the ending.

Alfred Hitchcock once told me, when I was analyzing a lot of things about his pictures, ‚Clint, you must remember, it’s only a movie.‘

You’ve got to keep your finger on the pulse of what your audience is thinking, and know what they’ll accept from you.

When we talk about how movies used to be made, it was over 100 years of film, literal, physical film, with emulsion, that we would expose to light and we would get pictures.

One of the great pleasures of going to see a Daniel Day-Lewis film: you haven’t seen him in five years. Where have you been? So, it’s a special event, right? Well, if you want to go see a movie that I’m in, it still may be a special event for you, but, you don’t feel like you don’t know where I’ve been.

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.

I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn’t care what kind of movies I made.

I have to admit, I sometimes wonder how much more successful I would have been as a coach had it not been for my spending summers on the golf course. I could have watched more film, that’s for sure. One advantage Joe Paterno had over me was that he didn’t play golf.

Nothing feels better than going onstage and everybody is singing every word – and actually wanting to see you.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

My movies just kind of sneak up on you. I don’t have to worry too much about what everybody is going to say. Anyway, I really don’t pay attention to what the world says about my movies. I just care about what my buddies think.

I’ve never been one to sit back and go, ‚I’d better do what the audience wants me to do, because I don’t want to lose them.‘

Yes, I’m always – I’m always surprised when you make a film and you live with it a while and you put it out, you never dream that anybody is ever going to want to really see it.

It would be great to be 105 and still making films.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

You just don’t know when you get in the editing room what you will need as a link or a tool for a transition. If you’re in a room, and there’s a kettle boiling, get a shot of it. Don’t worry if people think you’re nuts.

Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.

I’ve known Ben Stiller for a minute. One of my first movies was ‚Along Came Polly.‘

Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

No matter how you cut it, this real debate on personal accounts is about the legitimacy of Social Security; it’s not about the solvency of Social Security.

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information – the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate; and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.

I will make action movies, I think, for a few more years, another five years.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

What I’m hoping is that every album I’m going to do will give my audience something different, and that they’ll grow as I do.

Stage actors are usually much more conscious of speaking up and making sure that everyone can hear in the back of the theatre; a film actor probably thinks of that a little less.

I love being on stage, I love being able to tell a story, I love the fact that the audience listens and laughs at it. It makes me happy, and it’s what I live for.

Eventually, it came to this place like, ‚I’d like to direct, but I need to find the story to tell.‘ ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ became the story to tell.

‚Best Man Holiday‘ was a very successful film.

If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

I take a lot of pride in the work I do, because people pay to see me. They’ve got to get babysitters, park their car, get popcorn and candy. I’ve got to be conscious of that.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.