I think that man is conditioned to violence.

I am a liberal. I have always been a liberal.

My mom is an exceptionally wise and kind person.

I really like iconoclastic casting. I really do.

It's very exciting to continue to work at DreamWorks.

I don't know a nicer guy in the world than Alan Alda.

I can be accused of being acerbic as a critic and writer.

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

I've been a huge fan of Steven Bochco's for over two decades.

I grew up during Watergate. I was enamored of the study of that.

You learn quite a bit about your film from test screening audiences.

It's not such a bad thing to bring some naive optimism to Washington.

I came to the conviction that film criticism, in and of itself, was an art.

The freer a society becomes, the freer its arts can flourish and be exported.

I grew up in the home of a political cartoonist, so I was a junkie for politics.

What makes a man is when you go against your own instincts to do to the right thing.

I admire how Tarantino finds music that's semifamiliar and not famous: undiscovered gems.

The United States military is probably the most socialistic institution in the United States.

I don't think I'm equipped enough to be giving anyone a civics lesson or any kind of message.

There was never a day at West Point where I didn't ask myself, 'Where would I put the camera?'

You will never - and I mean never - be able to figure out if I was an Obama guy or a Hillary guy.

I believe Sam Peckinpah is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, and I hold him in high regard.

'Nothing But the Truth' is a journalistic thriller that is set during the end of days for print media.

I met Joan Allen at an L.A. Film Critics Awards' dinner, and I said, 'I want to write a movie for you.'

When you do a freeze frame, you have the opportunity to find the exact shot that you want - no guessing.

Unfortunately, in this country, when we have the opportunity to be bigots in private, we take it every time.

I want to have a movie where people's eyes are glued to the screen, not when they're running from the screen.

Sometimes, anonymous sources, when merely stating opinions or running a smear campaign, are certainly cowards.

I remember watching movies like 'Fatal Attraction' and watching the audience go bananas at the end of the film.

I look at 'Straw Dogs' as a very imperfect movie. It's a little bit slow, and its themes are a little bit murky.

When I was a kid, my heroes were not baseball players nor movie stars. My knights in shining armor were film critics.

I shot part of 'Resurrecting the Champ' in Denver, and I spent a summer going to survival school in Colorado Springs.

Just because the boogeyman of the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, it doesn't mean the world is living angelically.

The fight to get a shield law barring the government from being able to jail journalists is itself a non-partisan battle.

I do have this belief that we all have a chance to be great, beautiful people based on how we are raised and our surroundings.

'Commander in Chief' became a show not about why we should have a woman president but why we should not have a woman president.

Take a look at Mila Kunis. When you see her performance in 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall,' you see a beauty there, and also a sadness.

Rehearsing is more about blocking in the case of movies, I think, and blocking, of course, is very important to the beauty of a scene.

If I have to answer one more time, 'Why did you want to remake 'Straw Dogs?'' with the emphasis on the word 'why,' I'm going to flip out.

In my mind, I'm no longer daunted by the idea of a remake. In fact, I now look at it as a genre unto itself - so long as you make it your own.

There are a lot of westerns that deal with people standing up for their principles, and that is the predominant theme that has been in my films.

No matter how far they rise, women never stop being the caregiver. At the end of the day, women bear the emotional responsibility for their families.

Whenever you make a movie, when it's done, as a filmmaker, you never sit there and say, 'Boy, I really got that right.' It's, 'Where did I screw up?'

As much as I like Michael Moore - and I'm on the same political side as him - I think his documentaries are really a batch of manipulations and lies.

The common denominator of the great women leaders in the world - Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir - is that they're dramatically nonsexual.

I loved going to the movies, especially when I was a teenager in the seventies. How couldn't you in what was perhaps the greatest era of auteur cinema?

He may not have been a good actor, and I personally don't think he was a good president, but I'll tell you this: Ronald Reagan was a helluva character.

I grew up with an infestation of politics. I'm just nuts about it. It's our form of gladiators in the arena, only they are not in quite as good a shape.

There's no need to make any film. The word 'need' is pretty strong. But if there's a purpose behind making the film, there can be a justification for it.

I think people were a little premature in writing off violent movies. They're going to continue being made, and audiences will continue going to see them.

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