I knew by heart all the dialogue of James Dean’s films; I could watch Rebel Without a Cause a hundred times over.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.

In military school, on day one you must memorize the mission of the Merchant Marine Academy.

Dialogue means debates and everyone’s point of view.

In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

I don’t think it is so difficult to solve the problems between Cuba and the United States; it all depends on whether there is a dialogue, a discussion, or if the prejudices and hatred of people like the extremists and terrorists from the Cuban community, who try to impose their policies, prevail.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. ‚The Lord of the Rings‘ is intensely… landscaped. But ‚Discworld‘ is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.

Doing collections, doing fashion is like a non-stop dialogue.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

None of the films I’ve done was designed for a mass audience, except for ‚Indiana Jones.‘ Nobody in their right mind thought ‚American Graffiti‘ or ‚Star Wars‘ would work.

That’s when it becomes a business. When you’ve been public a long time, when it’s a career. You do certain films, you sell them.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

It’s probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.

The thing that’s made me open my eyes to what was happening to the environment and climate was films and documentaries.

I would dream. I focused all my attention on going to America. The subculture, James Dean, the rock n‘ roll, the beat writers.

In every movie I do have a dialogue.

I love good film, whether it’s an independent or studio film. The independent films, I think the good ones aren’t necessarily eccentric ones but they’re the more specific ones.

The best way to resolve any problem in the human world is for all sides to sit down and talk.

I was born. When I was 23 I started telling jokes. Then I started going on television and doing films. That’s still what I am doing. The end.

So, I’m lying on the couch and Laura walks in and I say, ‚Free at last,‘ and she says ‚You’re free all right, you’re free to do the dishes.‘ So I say, ‚You’re talking to the former president, baby,‘ and she said, ‚consider this your new domestic policy agenda.‘

Everybody thinks making films back to back is a big deal but they did it all the time in the old days.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.

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.

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

When you have a conflict, that means that there are truths that have to be addressed on each side of the conflict. And when you have a conflict, then it’s an educational process to try to resolve the conflict. And to resolve that, you have to get people on both sides of the conflict involved so that they can dialogue.

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

Not bragging by any means, but I could have done a lot of other stuff as far as working in films go and working in television… I had chances to do that stuff, but I like baseball, I really do.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

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

‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

If you really love films, and you really want to get the full impact, there’s a huge difference between watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I mean, the difference is electric.

I have a love interest in every one of my films: a gun.

I’ve read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of ‚You Can’t Go Home Again‘ and ‚Look Homeward, Angel.‘

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.