I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

‚Via Dolorosa‘ is the only thing I have ever acted in my life, professionally, and I’ll never act again.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, ‚Oh, you’re playing yourself.‘ I guess it’s kind of a compliment. Or people say, ‚Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.‘ The work is to make it look effortless. That’s the hard part.

As I have done in every election since I started voting so many years ago, I always like to take my time and examine the two candidates, see not only the two candidates but the policies they will bring in, the people they will bring in, who they might appoint to the Supreme Court, and look at the whole range of issues before making a decision.

I am fearful, or suspicious, of generalizations… They cannot guide me reliably in making decisions about particular individuals.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.

I want to try something different in Hollywood, to tell the audience I am not just an actor star – I am an actor, too.

Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.

Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.

I don’t have a vast longing for the stage.

I have always believed in evolving a consensus before taking any major decision.

What we won when all of our people united must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.

One of the key qualities a leader must possess is the ability to detach from the chaos, mayhem, and emotions in a situation and make good, clear decisions based on what is actually happening.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

I don’t have any regrets. I made all my own decisions.

We misjudge risk if we feel we have some control over it, even if it’s an illusory sense of control.

What matters in the Sun-tzu universe are not positions of strength and power, but situations in which you have options, full of potential force.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

No one can give you better advice than yourself.

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.

I’ve been really fortunate to be able to do different kinds of films in different scales, different genres, different kinds of roles, and that is important to me.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

My act is an exaggeration of a part of me. I’m much more expressive off stage.

I wonder how many decisions we make every day. I believe it’s probably hundreds. We decide whether or not to get out of bed, what we’ll eat, what we’ll do, what we’ll think about, what we’ll say… and on and on.

I don’t think there’s any point going for second or third.

It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

I’m not a photographer, so I didn’t get into F-stops or ND filters or background, foreground, cross-light, all that stuff. But I was interested in the camera and the lenses. That’s the world that I’m moving in, in terms of acting and giving a performance.

I’ve got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I’ve done it.

Choose your life’s mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 percent of all your happiness or misery.

I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.

Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me better.

If you’re a quarterback, you want everything on your shoulders. You want to be the one to make the decisions.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

As I followed my dream – stayed in-Spirit, that is, inspired – I made more money in the first year after I gave up my employment than I had made in the previous 35 years of my life.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

I’ve done films where we don’t rehearse, and I’ve done films where we heavily rehearse. I like rehearsals.

I enjoy acting when you really hit it right.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

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.

My dad seemed comfortable with his decision to be a ‚have-not,‘ but I knew that I wasn’t.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people – one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion’s den. You can’t just play around with all those big cats – you’ve got to take somebody on.

To be honest, I never really considered myself to be too much of an actress. So, whenever I get the chance to do music, I’m always, like, just in it. It’s like, ‚Oh my God, I finally get to do this. I’m so happy.‘

Politics is like football; if you see daylight, go through the hole.

The business aspect is one of the most important things about having a music career, because every choice you make in a management meeting affects your life a year-and-a-half from now.

Life is a matter of really tough choices.

It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.

If every choice you make comes from an honest place, you’re solid, and nothing anybody can say about you can rock you or change your opinion.

We all know what flopping is when we see it. The stuff that you see is where guys aren’t really getting hit at all and are just flailing around like a fish out of water.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Whatever is on the page is what I’m married to. I’m very prepared. I’m a thespian. I don’t like to improv. I don’t like to go off course ‚cause I think that’s where stuff happens. When you stick to the material ‚cause it’s written so well, that’s where the magic happens.

Life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act.

My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go.

I think one of the basic reasons men make good friends is that they can make up their minds quickly.

The goal for me is always to have the opportunity to work in different genres. This is a great and exciting time in my career, where I can have the opportunity to work in different genres, and also I recognize there’s not a lot of actors who have that opportunity and I’m grateful for it.

I just know what is right and I want to do what is right.

I got started as an actor when I was 12.

I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.