“I used to be prettier than I am, but I think I look better now. I was a pretty boy. Particularly in my early movies. I don't like looking at them so much. There's a sort of pretty thing about me.”

“How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.”

“The first two movies I directed failed, when I was 21 and 23, and that was the greatest thing that could have happened.”

“Well, everyone likes movies when they're a little kid.”

“When videotape came so a lot of movies that I do have a kind of afterlife in video. Things where movies that I do would come and go they still come and go but you can go rent them and see them on TV.”

“De Niro was a hero of mine. And Sean Penn. But I've realized I can't operate at that level of intensity. That's okay for movies. On TV, when you live with horror day in and day out, you have to protect yourself.”

“You know, I was a huge fan of comedy and movies and TV growing up, and I was able to memorize and mimic a lot of things, not realizing that that meant I probably wanted to be an actor.”

“I'll work with a director if I think I'm going to get into a comfortable situation, and if it's someone I respect and who respects me, even if they're not so well known. Movies are hard to make, and you have to work toward a common ethic and do your best.”

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

“For me the greatest source of income is still movies. Nothing - stocks, financial speculation, real estate speculation or businesses - makes more money for me than making movies.”

“It couldn't sound like a dog, because K9 isn't a dog, but I made it sound as mechanical as possible.”

“There are a lot of movies that are unbelievable successes that I would be mortified to be a part of.”

“I enjoy sports. I get a real joy from playing sports but I don't look for those movies. Oliver Stone wanted to know if I would do Any Given Sunday and it just didn't appeal to me.”

“I don't take the movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache.”

“People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear.”

“Cronenberg's a lot of fun, and that a lot of people don't know watching his movies. He doesn't take himself seriously. He's still reinventing himself.”

“In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies.”

“The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It's not going to put any other type of movies out of business.”

“I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.”

“Do you know what a blessing it is to make movies that make people happy?”

“I turn a lot of stuff down - big, big movies, the kind I wouldn't want to go to the cinema to see.”