I don't think I will ever write about politics or foreign policy. I feel like there is so much good writing in those areas that I have little to add. I also like to steer clear of writing about people whom I do not personally like.
I am an ambitious person, but I am not ambitious in the sense that I want jobs only for the sake of them... I am here to do things I think are worthwhile. I am always careful that the political positions I take are consistent with good policy. I woul...
Empty heads, cognitive science has taught us, learn nothing. The powerful cultural and personal flexibility of our species is owed at least in part to our starting off so well-informed; we are good learners because we know what to pay attention to an...
No one really knows the value of book tours. Whether or not they're good ideas, or if they improve book sales. I happen to think the author is the last person you'd want to talk to about a book. They hate it by that point; they've already moved on to...
I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make th...
I can feel things - tap into emotions. When I meet a new person, I know their life straight away. I suppose you could call it a special intuition, but it's my number one quality, and I'm always 99.9 percent right. If I don't like someone, it always t...
When George W. Bush hit the campaign trail in 2000, the precious possession he brought with him from home was his personal feather pillow. The theme of the Bush years was obliviousness. He was famously unavailable for debate and dialogue. He was deaf...
I'm not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I'm trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence, well written, can have a very moving effect without that person knowing why. There's a deep genetic part of you that somehow, even without your pe...
When I went to live in South Africa, I immediately began to understand what went wrong. Because here was a place supposed to be under apartheid - I arrived there in 1991 - but here a black person had more say and had more influence over his white gov...
It is the truth of grace and not of the law that brings you true freedom. The truth of the law only binds you. In fact, religious bondage is one of the most crippling bondages with which a person can be encumbered. Religious bondage keeps one in cons...
Studios, because they are investing a great deal of money in movies, they want a guarantee that when they hire somebody that person can deliver for them. Everything is fear based, so they pigeonhole people. But I've written everything, from Westerns ...
A lot of the physical flirtation with fear I did early on in my career, when I was a much younger person - stuff I wouldn't do now. But I was very interested in the mechanics of risk and fear in those days. And I found out fear pretty much always fee...
My daughter has probably gotten some benefit of being inspired by a woman who is willing to take on things. We travel. We travel to exotic places. I'm the first person to jump in the ocean with a whale. Even if I'm scared, I'll do it anyway, because ...
I've never been a popular person, but it doesn't matter. I have everything in my life that I want. I'm not a walking publicity stunt. I'm not an anarchist, or bitter. I'm not trying to be subversive. I just try to remain unguarded, unprotected by fea...
I always work only with friends, but it must be about them and myself. Because I film only very personal moments, nothing preplanned, staged or written, it has to be real and spontaneous. Some of them have become famous, some are not yet famous, some...
I have implicit faith in Sun Yat-sen, not because I am his blind follower, but because he really arouses the deepest respect in everybody. I do not know of another person in China who has such a broad and international outlook, whose ideas are so con...
I would like to stress this point undoubtedly: France sees the Arab Spring as auspicious. The Arab Spring holds out tremendous hope - hope for democracy and the rule of law, hope for peace and stability, hope for better future in which every person c...
Well, in our industry it's that the movies cost so much money to make they have to appeal to a broad audience. And I think that's part of what will loosen up in the future, as technology makes it cheaper, you'll be able to make films for a more selec...
I personally claim no special insight into Satan's methods, but I have at times been able to identify his influence and his actions in my life and in the lives of others. When I was on my first mission, Satan sought to divert me from my future path a...
I've been watching politics for 35 or 40 years and you just never know. You can have one person win the Iowa caucus and then the whole picture changes ten minutes later. The same thing can happen again after New Hampshire. I have no idea what's going...
Society needs both parents and nonparents, both the work party and the home party. While raising children is the most important work most people will do, not everyone is cut out for parenthood. And, as many a childless teacher has proved, raising kid...
