It’s a small percentage of people who do the 80-hour-a-week high-powered career thing, and they’re almost all men. Why? Well, men are driven by socio-economic status more than women.

Nashville is my home, and the reason why I get to do what I love.

That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

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

I absolutely want to have a career where you make’em laugh and make’em cry. It’s all theater.

I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword – two jackets, one that’s driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.

In my career as a director, there’s always been some point where you get halfway through it, or three-quarters, and you go: ‚What is this thing all about, and why am I telling the story? Does anybody really care about seeing this?‘ At that time you have to say: ‚OK, forget that and just go ahead.‘

When I’m in meetings until 5am and then have to get up two hours later for filming, sometimes I ask myself ‚why?‘

Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

Woman’s at best a contradiction still.

I didn’t want to be a fashion designer, and for a good half of my career I didn’t like it. I always wanted to do other things.

I don’t do meetings.

I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the king’s business.

We use work to numb out. We can’t turn off our machines because we’re afraid we’re going to miss something.

When I’m writing, I don’t feel neurotic. So it’s better for the family if I’m working.

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.

A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman as bad as she dares.

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

I look like a woman, but I think like a man.

I’m definitely looking forward to the day when I stop working – if I ever stop working. I like the idea of keeling over in my tomato vines in Sardinia or northern Italy.

I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, ‚He is not a lush.‘ That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, ‚Look!‘

If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don’t have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.

I’ve enjoyed all the parts of my career.

Start a part-time business and make as many mistakes as you possibly can while you still have your daytime job.

Feminists wish women to seem like men. They’re not men.

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious.

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.

Have fun in your command. Don’t always run at a breakneck pace. Take leave when you’ve earned it, spend time with your families.

You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it’s been something I’ve been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it’s something I hope to continue because it’s interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor.

No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like.

Even before I went to the UN, I often would want to say something in a meeting – only woman at the table – and I’d think, ‚OK well, I don’t think I’ll say that. It may sound stupid.‘ And then some man says it, and everybody thinks it’s completely brilliant, and you are so mad at yourself for not saying something.

ESPN is a great organization to work for.

The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

My mother never made me do anything for my brothers, like serve them. I think that’s an important lesson, especially for the Latino culture, because the women are expected to be the ones that serve and cook and whatever. Not in our family. Everybody was equal.

See, ‚A Time to Kill‘ was the one I got famous off of. Big ka-boom, over one weekend. After that, I did films that I really wanted to do.

More and more people work on Sundays as a consequence of the competitiveness imposed by a consumer society.

Moderation is the key so I work certain amount of time and then I take a certain amount of time off.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

I’ve never been a hands-on dad. I’m not ashamed to admit it, but you can’t run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.

I don’t fight in chase of an individual. I hear this sometimes where fighters work their whole careers to reach a matchup with a certain individual. I do not think in that way.

Everything I have, my career, my success, my family, I owe to America.

Work ends up dehumanizing people.

I found it hard to be young. When I was married in my twenties, I hated being regarded as ‚the little wife.‘ You don’t know what it was like then! I’d never even written a cheque. I had to ask my husband for money for groceries.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

I’m a very private person. I don’t go out much. I’m home with kids. I go to work. I don’t really like being the focus of attention, which is why I like being behind the camera more.

If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.

Actor’s life is very long.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Sexism is everywhere, bro. I don’t know if it’s ever not somewhere.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

I’ve found that men I’ve dated who are in the same business can be really competitive. I’ve found a great group of girlfriends in the same business who aren’t competitive, but a few times guys have started comparing careers and it has been… challenging.

In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.

Why should I be studying for a future that soon may not exist?

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.

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.