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.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Housework never really bothered me… what bothered me about it later was that it was expected to be your life… when you’re a housewife, you are constantly interrupted. You have no space in your life. It isn’t the fact that you do the laundry.

I will make action movies, I think, for a few more years, another five years.

I can honestly say – and it’s a big surprise to me – that I have never had a dream about being on the moon.

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

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

I always wished for this, but it’s almost turning into more of a nightmare than a dream.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

When I did ‚Bird,‘ it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

A friend will tell you she saw your old boyfriend – and he’s a priest.

I guess any movie actor can become a role model for audiences out there who enjoy him.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

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

When the kids are laughing in the audience, I tear up, I’m so happy I did a nice thing.

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

Even though I had won in other categories, I didn’t have any expectations when I came into F1. Qualifying fifth, finishing sixth? I didn’t expect it.

Put a love note in his shaving kit before he leaves on a business trip.

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

I worked with Steven Spielberg on Amistad… he seemed so very secure in himself that he let me do things.

We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

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

Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.

There’s strong data that, within companies, the No. 1 reason for ethical violations is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

I am completely fascinated by the differences and comparisons between real life and fairy tales because we’re raised as little girls to think that we’re a princess and that Prince Charming is going to sweep us off our feet.

But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.

What we need to understand is that when traditions become laws, rules, obligations and expectations others put on us that we don’t want to fulfill, then they lose real meaning and steal the joy from our lives. And if we’re too religious, we won’t be able to be led by the Holy Spirit and enjoy an intimate relationship with Him.

There’s a lot of pressure putting an album out all over the world and hoping people everywhere like it.

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.

When you’re a pop star, it’s a little conservative; you always have to stay in a box. You have fans that are five and fans that are 65; there are so many people wanting so many things.

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.

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.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

I was from a small town, and nobody really expects you to leave, especially before you graduate. That doesn’t happen.

The husband who decides to surprise his wife is often very much surprised himself.

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.

I always felt that if I was going to do a movie, I wanted it to be authentic.

I love almost everything about my work except conferences. I am too shy in front of an audience. But I love signings and having eye contact with a reader who already knows my soul.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

At the core, one of my original goals is to redefine what the streets expect.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

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.

When we talk about how movies used to be made, it was over 100 years of film, literal, physical film, with emulsion, that we would expose to light and we would get pictures.

When I’m making an American film, it’s more safe because there are so many people on the set to watch me. Whatever I do, they say, ‚What are you doing!? Tell me first!‘ There are so many restrictions.

I know what I do for my team and what my teammates expect of me on both ends of the floor.

My mother was a powerful influence. She made me toe the line. If I didn’t have a perfect report card, she showed her disappointment.

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.

Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.

To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two – to fix your opponent’s expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.

Brad was a huge surprise to me. I think we were both the last two people who were looking for a relationship. I certainly wasn’t. I was quite content to be a single mom with Mad.

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.

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