Never claim credit for anything. 'Cause you can't righteously do that. There's luck and grace and accident.

I saw what luck and success I had as an opportunity to twist it up and do something different, so I've always sought out different genres and different kinds of characters.

American Graffiti was the first movie where the director let me have any input. It was the first time anyone ever listened to me. George thought my character should have a crew cut, but I wasn't happy with that idea. I'd always had pretty long hair back then - in college, particularly - so I told George my character should wear a cowboy hat. George thought about it and he remembered a bunch of guys from Modesto, California, who cruised around, like my character, and wore cowboy hats, so it turned out that it actually fit the movie.

I shaved my hairline back and dyed my hair and wore a little powder, a little paint, a fat suit, and I changed my voice, but the emotions were consistent with what the point of the scene [with Branch Rickey] was.

I think what a lot of action movies lose these days, especially the ones that deal with fantasy, is you stop caring at some point because you've lost human scale.

What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen.

I've never wanted to be the boss.