“I'd love to act more. I've had to turn down multiple movies because I was on tour, but it's encouraging to know that someday there might be the right role, the right timing. And I've been writing a lot of music, so hopefully very soon I'll have recorded a project of my own. I also want to get a boat and open a restaurant.”

“When we talk about Oscars, it's almost as a symbol of excellence, and the American public and the worldwide public accept that symbol. So, a movie like 'The Artist' that costs $14 million, has to go out and compete with movies that cost $140 million. How does David deal with Goliath?”

“I'm not an admirer of action movies. I just think, Oh my God, it must be so tiring.”

“Here's the thing about movies, all movies end up on television. That's their life. Whether you like it or not, I don't care how much money you spend on it, or how big or broad the film is, or who the actors are in it, eventually it's all coming out of the box.”

“When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical.”

“The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.”

“Movies, as evidenced by a chorus of protesting and celebrating Americans, influence broader trends.”

“On radio and television, magazines and the movies, you can't tell what you're going to get. When you look at the comic page, you can usually depend on something acceptable by the entire family.”

“I'm blessed to have cool roles in these big movies.”

“Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.”

“I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards: how did they do that?”

“You don't want to be photographed? You don't want to be known? Then you don't need to be out there peddling movies.”

“Everyone told me to pass on Speed because it was a 'bus movie.'”

“I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.”

“I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.”

“I never enjoyed working in a film.”

“I'm really proud of 'Moneyball.' To me, it's about feeling pride in a movie I made. I think when I'm an old man I'll be able to show it to my grandkids with pride. That's all I can really go for: making movies to please me.”

“I'm terrible at horror movies, by the way. I get scared so easily.”

“People need to start to think about the messages that they send in the movies.”

“Give me a couple of years, and I'll make that actress an overnight success.”

“It's never really that much fun for me to do movies anyway, because you - you know, you have to get up very early in the morning and you have to go in and you spend a lot of time waiting around.”