I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.
Still, the film nearly didn't happen a number of times. There were great arguments with United Artists about how to reduce the cost because they were nothing if not conscious of the price of the film.
I think that taxes would be fair if we first get rid of the tax code. This is the ultimate solution, not to just say we're going to trim around the edges, not to say that we will try to simplify a little of this and a little of that. The problem is, replace the tax code, so we can establish tax fairness for everybody.
For we can affirm with a good conscience that we have, after reading the Holy Scripture, applied ourselves and yet daily apply ourselves to the extent that the grace of the Lord permits to inquiry into and investigation of the consensus of the true and purer antiquity.
I still have a problem with nuns. I follow them around like a kitten with a ball of yarn. After a while, all my characters become very close friends.
For the kind of thing that we were showing, the budget was sufficient. As we were speaking of in Haiti, we had not done that before in exactly this form and we had to have costumes for it.
I sought Ben Affleck because I needed an everyman for this role. Ben appeals to men and women. He gives you a sense of intelligence, the notion of a guy who can think on his feet.
Bill and Hillary Clinton have one central idea in their uncluttered, ambitious minds: Hillary in 2008. Let Bush get re-elected, use the '04 primaries and general election to clean out the underbrush of competing Democratic candidates, and proceed unimpeded to the '08 nomination.
I wasn't playing mind games with anybody, I just said what I said. I am responsible for it, but I wish everybody would fall asleep for that one and let me go out there and do my thing.
I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.
In all nations an exceptional man exists that compensates the deficiencies of the remainder. In those moments, when humanity is found collectively in a state of decadence, there always remain those exceptional beings as point of reference.
The other day they asked me about mandatory drug testing. I said I believed in drug testing a long time ago. All through the sixties I tested everything.
I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.
In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
I've been doing musical theater since I was a kid. And look for a CD from me in the future. I want to write all the songs!
I courted fame but as a spur to brave and honest deeds; who despises fame will soon renounce the virtues that deserve it.
I was on the Johnny Carson show, I believe 114 or 104 times. And aside from those times on the air, I never spoke to him. I never met him.
Seeing our VH-1 Behind the Music shows just how dysfunctional some of the moments of the band were but this new line-up has put the fun back in dysfunction.