Every time I try to retire, or even think of retiring from acting, my agent comes up with a script.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

I always say, decisions I make, I live with them. There’s always ways you can correct them or ways you can do them better. At the end of the day, I live with them.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

My parents pretty much realized that I would do whatever I wanted, and that was it, really.

Of two evils, choose neither.

The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

Do I wear a helmet? Ugh. I do when I’m riding through a precarious part of town, meaning Midtown traffic. But when I’m riding on secure protected lanes or on the paths that run along the Hudson or through Central Park – no, I don’t wear the dreaded helmet then.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

In this knowledge-worker age, it’s now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs – so the pressure to do well is really high.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.

We spend so much time sublimatin‘, thinkin‘ about, ‚What am I going to have for lunch, dinner?‘

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

If we could just find out who’s in charge, we could kill him.

People are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting lawyers, instead of their conscience, be their guide.

It’s extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can’t get a job on a ship unless you have seaman’s paper’s, and you can’t get seaman’s papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me.

Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.

Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage.

When I get logical, and I don’t trust my instincts – that’s when I get in trouble.

Climbing to the top demands strength, whether it is to the top of Mount Everest or to the top of your career.

If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

Don’t wait for the last judgment – it takes place every day.

I dropped out of high school and I couldn’t go to college ‚cause I wasn’t smart enough, so I’d resigned myself to loading trucks and playing punk rock on the weekends.

Before I became a chief minister, I never thought that one day I’d be the chief minister.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

If you gonna wear the mohawk, you stick with it. You don’t just be dibby-dabbing. You make up your mind.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

Quitting is the easiest thing to do.

Never get married in college; it’s hard to get a start if a prospective employer finds you’ve already made one mistake.

Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. do: prevent the wars that we can avoid so that we fight only the ones we must.

A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, ‚If you don’t know how to make the right decision, you’re not a director.‘

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did. So after that, I switched to Communications.

Eight, as you know, is not a good number for a multi-member court.

It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

There are certain age limits on police officers. They’d have retired me out at 65.

There are hunters, and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience, and alertness, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim.

There’s a reason why the Foo Fighters don’t blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that’s hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right.

I have been trying to retire to the back of the camera for quite a few years, and in 1970, when I first started directing, I said, ‚If I could pull this off, I can some day move to the back of the camera and stay there.‘

My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that’s the law.

I like talking. I like acting.

If the critics are right that I’ve made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them.

You have to just make the choices you make in life. I made the choices I made because I believed they were right for me.

We think it’s fun for our kids to have cameos and join us on set, but not to be actors. That’s not our goal for Brad and me at all. I think we would both prefer that they didn’t become actors.

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the undecideds could go one way or another.

Decisiveness is a characteristic of high-performing men and women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all.

I’ve played real people before, but I never knew them.

The problem with car dealerships is you’ve already decided what you want to buy before you even go there, and you’re really just going there to talk through some annoying negotiation.

I want to play a fireman and a spy. I want to learn special effects.

My only scheme was to be a rapper.

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can’t explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

The risk for me would be in not taking one – that’s the only thing that’s really risky for me.

If I’d had good discipline, I might have gone into music.