The loneliness is when you pick up and move, even if you are not originally from that place, and you have some memories that you want to embrace. Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window.

The leadership class of the Republican Party is a conservative Christian loony bin. The leadership of the Republican Party are a bunch of sociopathic maniacs who have their lips super-glued to the ass of the conservative right.

If you can get a teen leader in each sector of a student population, you can pull people in. Everybody wants to get involved, but most are too afraid. When they see a person they think is cool leading it, they're first to join.

My grandfather was a very elegant individual. My father also. He was a lawyer and farmer in Cuba. In Miami, he had to go to work wherever he could. But whenever it was time to go out, you saw how they cared for how they looked.

I'm a fan of Ernest Hemingway work and specifically The Old Man and the Sea. I researched the relationship he had with the captain of his boat for 20 years, Gregorio Fuentes, and that inspired me to write a screenplay about it.

Our job as actors, especially in front of a camera, is almost like textile artists. We spend so much time getting the right texture of yarn, and working out the color scheme, and binding off the weave, and making it just right.

I watched a film with a very famous, great, great actor, I won't mention his name because everyone loves his memory, but I thought, "God he was acting a lot." Great actor, but nonstop acting. Wall to wall, fitted-carpet acting.

As an actor, the only thing we can do is play the truth at that moment. Because at any point in time if you play the future, or you play that you know something that the audience does not know, it kills the illusion of reality.

I was shooting a scene in my new film, No Strings Attached, in which I say to Natalie Portman, “If you miss me. you can’t text, you can’t email, you can’t post it on my Facebook wall. If you really miss me, you come and see me.

I really think that everybody would like to be an actor. Why wouldn't they? It's great work if you can get it. The one thing that prevents most people from saying, 'I'm just gonna go to Hollywood!' is that it seems unrealistic.

Making movies has become such a golden ring, and it's all such a big business, that the rewards system has gotten totally out of whack. Suddenly, you're treated in a manner befitting someone who is actually an important person.

In order to inhabit a villain, you mustn't care what the audience think of you. That's not why you are there. You mustn't care for a second whether the audience likes you or dislikes you. Your villain has to be way beyond that.

If you are a libertine, if you're not given to long-term faithful relationships, you tend to project your behavior onto everyone else. It's like the person who knows they're not trustworthy; they tend to mistrust everyone else.

I had one year of struggle. My parents were always there, but I didn't want to rely on them. Now it's moving pretty fast. I'm not rich, but obviously this is fantastic. All I know to do with money is put it in a shoebox anyway.

Its Christmas Eve! Its the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be.

I was very much in my room with my marionette stage, you know, creating these incredibly boring things that I felt were so fascinating, and forcing my relatives to come, and charging money for them to see my little productions.

Fame is like a big eraser. It's strange, now that I'm famous. In my parents' opinion, all the shitty things - all the wreckage of my past - is erased. Now it's like I was never the kid who got arrested. Now I'm a wonderful son.

The best moments can't be preconceived. I've spent a lot of time in editing rooms, and a scene can be technically perfect, with perfect delivery and facial expression and timing, and you remember all your lines, and it is dead.

I think it can be fun to be single and date like when you don't want a relationship. Or when you've just gotten out of a relationship, and, after get over the initial shock, you're thinking, hey, it's kind of cool being single.

The books we read change over the years as new books come out and they change over the grades. Books we are reading in fifth and sixth grade now may have been seventh and eighth grade books in the past, or the other way around.

I've got a whole mantel just waiting for those awards to come, a whole big mantel. There's just so much available space. I've got the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, all ready to shine on them. I dust it off every day.

We as comics do want an immediate response from the audience. It's really quiet on the set, and there are only the producers, and the director, so a comic is looking for someone to give a reaction, even if it is the camera guy.

You have this great big fantasy life, and it looks like a non-stop 24/7 party. But what do you do when you get to the end of the Internet and there's nothing left to buy? There's just a picture of Wayne Newton flipping you off.

I feel like my style's always been influenced by 'less is more.' The coolest styles are kind of simple and classic, like a white T-shirt and jeans. Maybe you have a cool belt and cool shoes, but everything else you keep simple.

Northern New Jersey looks like a cluster of idyllic suburbs, but each of those seemingly normal towns has a dark side that's constantly gossiped about but never publicly acknowledged. They seem to thrive on their strangenesses.

Fear runs our lives. It doesn't matter who you are. You have to understand your relationship with fear. Whether you're scared of getting into a relationship; or taking the new job; or a confrontation - you have to size fear up.

The American audience has really opened up to women being A.) funny and B.) kinda crude. 'Bridesmaids' is R-rated, and I think it was a major coup for women to have an R-rated comedy that did really well. Same as 'Bad Teacher.'

There are occasions when I've pretended to be in a firefight, and then there are people who have really been in a firefight. Clearly it's absolutely ridiculous, and even disrespectful, to suggest that I understand what that is.

I like cats a lot. I've always liked cats. They're great company. When they eat, they always leave a little bit at the bottom of the bowl. A dog will polish the bowl, but a cat always leaves a little bit. It's like an offering.

In the theater you rehearse in order to do the performance. And in the movies the rehearsal and the performance are kind of the same thing. You're figuring it out and hopefully the camera is pointed at you when you're doing it.

I owe baseball all that I have and much of what I hope to have. Baseball made my entrance to the film industry immeasurably easier than I could have made it alone. To the greatest game in the world I shall be eternally in debt.

I always like to try different things, different genres; stories that have a dramatic element and can generate conflict which I find appealing; where the characters have to overcome obstacles. That kind of thing is challenging.

When actors have the opportunity to play a larger-than-life icon - my wife did it with Tina Turner, and Jamie Foxx did it with Ray Charles - you have to make a decision how you go in. What do you start with? Where do you begin?

If you pick up an eighteenth-century play, at the top it says 'The Argument,' and then you have a list of characters, and then you have the play. I was just always struck by that - that, of course, good drama is about conflict.

A lot of times, when mother-son or mother-daughter relationships have been put on screen, they tend to trickle towards ugly, and I don't find that totally realistic for the wide swath of us, and it's also not that fun to watch.

I don't say: 'can't do that', 'won't do that'. I've never thought in that way about work. The genuine truth, and I do think about this a lot, is that I'm one of the least competitive people you'll ever meet. Except with myself.

Film has become such a central part of our culture now that I think sometimes too great a weight is placed upon it in terms of scrutiny and analysis. There's a lot of rather specious professorial stuff that swirls around films.

I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.

I did a play, back in the day, called 'Sucker Punch,' and it meant so much for me. I was 21. And I went, 'I just want to do work like that.' Stuff I believe in. And when I have compromised, I've never really felt good about it.

Every day of my life I walk with the idea that I am black, no matter how successful I am. And our success is tempered by that; you're successful in this way given the fact you are black, and most blacks don't get to that point.

I spent my whole life being very shy and introverted and I kind of found my release and therapy in the gym. I became this big, menacing physical stature of a man but internally I'm still kind of insecure. Warm, fuzzy and gooey.

I lived for going down the rabbit hole of meeting weird people. Of course, come Monday I would be tallying up all the different situations, and each one was progressively more dangerous. I got lucky in that I didn't go to jail.

By no means am I as moral as Clark Kent, by no means at all. I made a lot of mistakes and done a lot of things that are in no way, shape, or form Superman- or Clark Kent-esque. But generally, I live my life that way and try to.

I am never a stranger anywhere I go, and it gives me the opportunity to choose my habitat by literally throwing a dart at a globe. The freedom that permits one to feel welcome where ever the hang their hat cannot be overstated.

If you want a long-term relationship that doesn't require a lot of work, I say, get a dog. They love you no matter what. But when it comes to humans, there's no secret; you really have to appreciate the person every single day.

The strongest, toughest men all have compassion. They're not heartless and cold. You have to be man enough to have compassion - to care about people and about your children" (217) - John Singleton "Oh Man, I've Become My Father

Sometimes when you're the good guy, you're sort of trapped. "Oh, he can't say that." And even when you're playing a real person like a Steven Biko, you're sort of stuck within those confines. So yeah, bad guys do have more fun.

I think there's gonna be three networks, and then the rest will be Internet-based, and Amazon is gonna be huge and one of the networks. This is so serious. Ha. But really, you see it happening right now. You can see the shifts.

My spine healed incorrectly. There were long periods when I'd be perfectly all right, and then there were many other times when I wasn't, when my back would give out and throw me down to the floor amid waves of nauseating pain.

Life is stranger than fiction. It's nice to have stuff that people don't know about. And it helps when you read a bad review. You can go, "This guy doesn't have me figured out." There's more mystery to you than they understand.

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