I think the fantasy of being a movie star is more powerful than the reality. So, for me, even if it's not a great film or a great play I'm doing, to know that you went for it. You had an experience that made you grow artistically and personally. What...
I find as a viewer, when I go to see comedies, the strain to be funny throughout the whole thing. I start to lose my sense of reality, and it ends up feeling like an empty experience; there's funny stuff in it but I've lost the emotional connection t...
Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of ...
Women are, in my view, natural peacemakers. As givers and nurturers of life, through their focus on human relationships and their engagement with the demanding work of raising children and protecting family life, they develop a deep sense of empathy ...
It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a b...
We all like going to the dark side of things; we all like dipping into worlds that we don't know anything about, or hopefully don't know anything about. I think 'Banshee' gives people a chance to do that pretty safely because we all know there's a so...
The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted b...
The more I pay attention to what's going on inside, the more I realize that how I feel, and how I react to what I feel, really creates my reality. And the more in touch I can be, the better chance I have to control what's happening in my life.
You know, you grow up with the image of John Travolta being super cool - 'Saturday Night Fever,' Brian De Palma, handsome young god... he, in reality, is a very silly man. And I mean that in a good way. He'll walk around the set talking in little wei...
When you're a famous, successful person at 16 years old, the rules change for you. Everybody is doing things for you to make life easier so you can go out and play. And I think you miss out on lot of growing up and a lot of reality checks.
The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that diff...
I'm 58 years old and I just went through 8 back surgeries. They started cutting on me in February 2009, and I was basically bed ridden for almost two years. I got a real dose of reality that if you don't have your health, you don't have anything.
I hope that Americans will give careful and well-informed thought to root causes and historical realities, in which case I think they will question why a supposedly 'legitimate' state such as Israel has had to conduct decades of war against a subject...
Everything we do these days - our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusal to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to cults of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national exceptionalism - all of t...
In one aspect, my works record the history of the development of Chinese society. Concern about the situation of Chinese reality is one important theme of my works. I am trying to ask, 'How does our society develop? What are the problems in our socie...
People were fed up with reality shows about midgets getting married and weird Jerry Springer talk shows. There had been a real dry spell of intelligent family-oriented viewing: the type of program that Mom, Dad and the kids can all watch together. Wi...
For a culture that has such a problem with death, we seem to deal with it in a quite bizarre way. We see people shot, killed and blown up, and we find it funny and sexy and all those things. But, the reality of it is that every day people die, and pe...
Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a c...
The great photographers of life - like Diane Arbus and Walker Evans and Robert Frank - all must have had some special quality: a personality of nurturing and non-judgment that frees the subjects to reveal their most intimate reality. It really is wha...
It was simple reality - most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock - great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of ...
The stories that I want to tell, especially as a director, don't necessarily have a perfect ending because, the older you get, the more you appreciate a good day versus a happy ending. You understand that life continues on the next day; the reality o...
