I realise that I do not change the course of history. I am an actor, I do a movie, that's the end of it. You have to realise we are just clowns for hire. After I had success it was great, at first, not to worry about money. It was on my mind when I w...
After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have. But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosio...
I'm grateful for my health, glad I'm making people laugh, glad my wife still likes me after a lotta years, grateful my daughter is growing, glad I don't take myself too seriously, glad L.A. has Astro Burger, grateful to be coming home to Harlem soon....
Drama can feel like therapy whereas comedy feels like there's been a pressure and a weight lifted off of you. You come to work and you laugh all day, you go home and you feel light and there's a certain feeling when you're sitting with the audience a...
Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being up...
When I was driving home after registration, I heard this song on the radio, a guy singing about not ever going to class in college and always hanging out and singing for his friends. I laughed and said, I can relate, because it was so much like me. I...
I'm very lucky because I don't half get some juicy jobs. But I can't tell you the number I've turned down in the past 20 years because I wanted to be at home, looking after my son. There was never any question about that. Alfie and I are dead close. ...
I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word 'home' has only one meaning: Iran. I suppose it's that way for everyone: Home is the place where one is b...
How do you know Hollywood is getting serious about video games? They want to make one of their own. In 'Defiance,' the remaining humans on Earth, as well as alien species looking for a new home, find themselves settling for peace after a massive war ...
Go after the illegal employers. No free stuff. Take the handcuffs off law enforcement. They'll go home! They'll self-deport! The problem today is they break the law. They come across the border. And again, what's coming across that border today are b...
I feel that I am completely in solidarity with Jews in the world, because I know what it is to be a Jew. I've seen what it is; I am myself of Jewish origin, and therefore I can only be fully in support of the idea that the Jews, after all they've suf...
My parents were very supportive of my chess. When I got home after a game of chess, having missed school or something, they always made me feel very welcome; I didn't feel guilty at all about pursuing chess with such fervour. They never, for instance...
Society has not been set up in a way that allows women to go back to work after taking time off. Many women now have to work as well as do everything at home and no one can do everything. Society needs to find a way of relieving women.
After spending 460 days as a hostage, I did emerge a fundamentally changed person. But I think, like everyone does as they grow older and probably wiser, I can look back at my earlier life - my history, my mistakes, the joy I felt as a young woman tr...
I actually love history. I've devoured book after book of stories from World War I and World War II. They're really two sections of world history that really interest me. I knew very extensively a lot about World War I.
I went back to Dallas for a little while to finish my short film 'Rusty Forkblade.' It was not the instant success I thought it was going to be. There's a false narrative that if you make a short film right after senior year, you'll be plucked out to...
My mother's belief in spiritual healers grew stronger after our family went through a rough patch following my father's death. Sufi saint Karimullah Shah Kadri changed our lives, and all of us converted to Sufism. But it wasn't an instantaneous decis...
You know, in Los Angeles, you're constantly in your car, you're sealed up, you're not walking around. Whereas in New York, after a while, all your stuff is kind of public, in one way or the other. I'm not saying either one of those is bad; they're bo...
The way my family always did Christmas was on Christmas Eve, it wasn't really centered around a dinner on Christmas Eve. It was more about keeping the kids calm. Sometime after dark is when we were going to open all the presents underneath the tree f...
Mom still has a huge, beautifully decorated Christmas tree. The whole family comes together after midnight mass and has the traditional plum cake and wine. We spend the night at mom's home, and in the morning we wake up and open the presents. In the ...
I was a sickly baby, and after two sets of adoptive parents took me home, they returned me to the orphanage because of a serious respiratory infection. But as they say, the third time's a charm, because my mom and dad adopted me and took me into thei...
