If you consider film an art form, as some people do, then the Western would be a truly American art form, much as jazz is.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.

We can have no ’50-50′ allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.

The American claim that the bombing of North Vietnam was directed against military targets does not withstand direct investigation.

I like Italian movies. I was frequently there in the ’60s, in Rome and the vicinity. It was a great period in life. I was very influenced by their stuff.

Trash talk? Smack talk? This is an American term that makes me laugh. I simply speak the truth. I’m an Irish man.

I am a fan of the ‚Rocky‘ films, and ‚Rocky 4‘ is my favourite. I also like ‚The Warriors.‘

I don’t watch television and I rarely go to the cinema, but I recently watched ‚The King’s Speech‘ on a flight. It was so beautiful and so simple.

I’ve always wanted to do a family movie.

As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

I’ve never been that much of a money guy. I’m more of a film guy, and most of the money I’ve made is in defense of trying to keep creative control of my movies.

I have kind of a funny relationship with movies. I don’t have to see the whole movie to get an impression of it or to let it have an influence on me.

I do believe in the energy and the productivity of the American business world.

In those days, the early 1980s, TV and film were interchangeable.

I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he’s an American child.

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.

I didn’t know the term ‚synesthesia‘ until I was working on ‚Cruel Summer.‘ Halfway into writing that, I really understood that, my entire life, I had been trying to describe this condition of mine: through painting, through this seven-screen Surround Vision film we shot in Qatar, through all these things.

I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

Everybody accuses me of moving fast when I direct a picture. I don’t move fast, but I just keep moving.

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.

No greater nor more affectionate honor can be conferred on an American than to have a public school named after him.

I do have tatoos, and I do wear leather, but there are other sides of me, that my film express.

When even one American – who has done nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth – then all Americans are in peril.

None of my kids want to be actors. They are actually very interested in being musicians. I think they like the process of film from the outside. Mad is interested in editing. Pax loves music and deejaying.

Music is like film to me.

I’ve always loved black culture; I don’t know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I’m older – I’m in my early 50s – so you’ll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

The only film I’ve enjoyed starring a wrestler was Mickey Rourke in ‚The Wrestler.‘

I’ve got wide tastes, but I don’t like jazz.

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.

The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

My favorite movies of all times is ‚Doctor Zhivago,‘ and I love ‚Gone With the Wind.‘ I’d love to play some Southern belle or something where I owned a plantation.

In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I’m concerned, that part is Greg’s for life. I’ve had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I’ve always refused.

I read every book there was on jazz, about the original players – King Oliver, Buddy Bolden and all those groups. At one time I was fairly well schooled in that… I could tell you who played where and when, historically, way before my time.

The Army was always big on Clausewitz, the Prussian; the Navy on Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American; and the Air Force on Giulio Douhet, the Italian. But the Marine Corps has always been more Eastern-oriented. I am much more comfortable with Sun-tzu and his approach to warfare.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

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.

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I’ve done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?

One good thing about acting in film is that it’s good therapy.

Those movies sure got me into a rut.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

I wish every American had an opportunity to sit down, to go to a base, to meet with families, to meet with service members, to sit down with our veterans – because we would think differently about our challenges as individuals.

I saw ‚Magic Mike,‘ and I thought it was great.

American stuntmen are smart – they think about safety. When they do a jump in a car, they calculate everything: the speed, the distance… But in Hong Kong, we don’t know how to count. Everything we do is a guess. If you’ve got the guts, you do it. All of my stuntmen have gotten hurt.

I think – I don’t know, maybe it’s nostalgia. But the choice, losing the choice to be able to use film is going to be – it’s gone. It’s going to be gone.

The jazz I love is sweet and pure with raw elements, which is exactly what the good hip-hop is doing now.

‚Rocky‘ and ‚Rocky III‘ were the best.

My audience went, ‚Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?‘ And then they went, ‚Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.‘ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

A lot of artists fail when they try to act, and they flop. So when I get into acting, it’s going to be to do it well, something good, something of quality. I want people to say, ‚Wow, that movie‘ – or that show or whatever – ‚turned out really well.‘

The skin of my character in ‚The Man Who Fell to Earth‘ was some concoction, a spermatozoon of an alien nature that was obscene and weird-looking.

I’m not Russell Crowe. I’m not going to do a period piece.

Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited – that has music and rhythm and time.

My folks always let me go to the movies every Saturday. We were really motion-picture goers.

I speak to you only as an American who happens to be an American Negro and one who is proud of that heritage. We ask for nothing special. We ask only that we be permitted to compete on an even basis, and if we are not worthy, then the competition shall, per se, eliminate us.

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.

I am a freeman, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order.