“The right really dominates radio, and it's amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn't. They want to shut other people up. They really don't understand the First Amendment.”

“If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.”

“Every great film should seem new every time you see it.”

“We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.”

“By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.”

“Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.”

“Most of us do not consciously look at movies.”

“Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.”

“The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.”

“A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.”