Canada is like a nice family living over a biker bar . . . They keep telling the downstairs neighbors to keep down the noise, people are trying to sleep.

Many actors want to play Hamlet and Macbeth. Ever since I became an actor, from the very beginning I just wanted to play a Shetland pony. I cannot explain why

Next to that kid, we all look like onions.

So, most of it was done over the phone. But one of the first things I did as a director, because it's one of the first things you should do, even though most don't, is to ask good actors who they think is right for the part. They know better than anybody. But without missing a beat Maggie said Pauline Collins. I didn't know Pauline because I hadn't seen Shirley Valentine, but then I saw this thing that she did with Woody Allen [You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger], in which she was wonderful as a psychic, and I said to her on the phone: "The dialogue seemed improvised."

A "take" is an opportunity to fail ... and we think that we have to get it right all the time.

The better you are as a parent, the richer the nest you've built, the more difficult it is for your kids to leave. So they have to invent things to dislike about you. And they're brilliant at it.

Poverty is not dated. Homeless people have looked the same since the thirteenth century. Go back to the times of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Look at photographs. It's amazing. The face on a homeless person is timeless.