American Quotes

I love the idea that biodiesel has the potential to support farmers, especially the family farms.

I just finished a film with Michael Radford called Dancing at the Blue Iguana.

I have four dogs, four horses, a cat, and a bunch of wild frogs.

I find that when I play reality-based characters, it is only as fun for me if I have a lot of time to do research. If I don't it just isn't exciting but if I do, it can be fun because I can learn about that person and the world that they live in and I can become somebody else.

Filmmaking is such a collaborative medium.

Being a humanitarian, supporting animal rights activists, human rights activists, it's all the same.

And then of course, obviously as far as issues such as global warming, something has to be done on the corporate side, there has to be some mandate or some legislation.

And I know that the younger generation is doing things that are so ingenious. And for them it's not a matter of a political belief or an environmental stance. It's really just common sense.

A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.

Obviously we're a consumer nation and you have the power to influence these big corporations who are running the world right now through what you chose to, or not to, purchase.

I really struggle with that feeling of helplessness. That's why I really try to get my blogs, and even myself, to point to the positive and look at all the inspiring things that are happening.

It's the first villain that I've played in a movie that has absolutely no vulnerability and no innocence, nothing whatsoever that is likeable about her other than she's so bad.

It's not necessary to go far and wide. I mean, you can really find exciting and inspiring things within your hometown.

When you're not involved, other people's unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it's you, it ceases to be a comedy.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.

Love and despair go hand in hand.

I'll tell you why I like writing: it's just jumping into a pool. I get myself into a kind of trance. I engage the world, but it's also wonderful to just escape. I try to find the purities out of the confusion. It's pretty old-fashioned, but it's fun.

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.

I lost my second marriage because of drinking, and I loved the woman very much. But I thought I needed booze to write. I'm glad I was disabused.

I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.

I found out about reviews early on. They're mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That's probably why I'm less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.

I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don't like the wispy and the vague... or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I'm impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I've done have come to me by instinct.

A man's got to do what a man's got to do. A woman must do what he can't.

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.

If we can by any method establish a relation of mutual trust between the laborer and the employer, we shall lay the foundation stone of a structure that will endure for all time.