Most of my life I was occupied with American television and American food. My ethnicity was my choice. It still is.

I don't like rooms you never use or that are wasted space but I also like a sparseness and a cleanness.

That's another piece of advice: Don't go to college; follow your dreams. Unless you're a doctor - then go to college.

Eight times a week, I got to be a gay man, a remarkable gay man, and every night, that felt as full, as true, as passionate, and as authentic as I ever felt in my life.

A film is made in somebody's head - out of their determination to do it at all.

I left home when I was just 17, finished up high school, and went to work.

I'd like to stay in Chicago, but if they don't want me, somebody will.

Life is hard. It is. And it's like, I don't want anybody feeling any pain.

Aging nations have arteries clogged with obsolete laws, slowing blood flow and preventing oxygen from reaching all parts of the body politic. Physicians call this arteriosclerosis; historians see...

Trouble is, kids feel they have to shock their elders and each generation grows up into something harder to shock.

I had to buy into being a better player and being able to be coached.

'Mean' is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt...

Whatever God has planned for me, that's what's going to happen.

I wouldn't wish overnight success on anyone. You have no real friends. Everyone works endless hours at different studios, so far apart. Even on your own lot, relationships were formal and often...

When I see things through my eyes, I don't want to ever just be really negative towards someone's performance. There are many ways to skin a cat. Sometimes I watch the guys, and they're doing...

I think confidence is a true form of beauty.

You don't just luck into things as much as you would like to think you do. You build step by step, whether it is friendships or opportunities.

For a book to function... it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that's exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover.

Picasso had his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now.

I'm a little bit anally retentive, a little bit OCD, but a whole lot clean.

I find it more consoling to think of myself as little than to think of myself as big. I think I've gotten that from animals, particularly dogs. Dogs live such a modest life, and they don't live long,...

Basically I write songs, and I need for there to be a home for these songs.

When we built Amblin, we even put Murphy beds in there because we thought that was so practical. Why would anybody, if you were working on something, need to go home at night? You'd just stay there,...

I've never eaten a strawberry in my life. I have no desire to do that.

I am not a fancy cook or an ambitious cook. I am a plain old cook.

I ended up living in fear for most of my childhood.

We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.

One of the most missed components of the entire insurgency in Iraq was that Syria and Bashar al-Assad facilitated Al Qaeda's operations in Iraq. They actually headquartered the Iraq Ba'ath Party and...

We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.

You have to learn how to write each book.