My agent is the quickest, sharpest man on earth.

For me, personally, there is one really interesting thing. You're all a bit too young for that, but when you get to a certain level of experience, accumulation of experience you start slowly to once in a while get a whiff of the feeling, I'd love to be twenty years younger but with what I know and have experienced at this point.

Stephen Sondheim I am in awe of.

That's exactly what I'm driving at. 'Basterds' was interesting because it was, in a way, unfamiliar. I thought well, OK. Let's leave the comfort zone and just risk it. Why not? Because, exactly as you said, in a way, by taking that risk, I make up a little bit for my ignorance in the subject, or rather, the genre.

For a while, I couldn't decide whether or not I should pursue singing in the opera or acting. And I'm glad that I chose the latter because I wasn't a very good singer.

There is quite an important director in Germany who I think in the early fifties over here, and then went back, and he said something that's absolutely true. And it's more important to repeat that today than it ever was. Not for you, but for us over there it is important. He said, 'In America they make movies like art, and sell it like commodities. We make make movies like commodities and sell them like art.'

You can't always do the extraordinary, in between you have to do the ordinary. Because if you didn't, what would constitute the extraordinary?