After World War II the Republicans - the Wall Street crowd - were very worried about a depression coming back. They hated Franklin Roosevelt in that crowd, my father among them. And there was a great fear in '46 that we'd fall back into the pits. And they always wanted to break up the Roosevelt legislation.

I think everyone has the same question on their mind: Is the glass half-full or half-empty?

Every day that you get up, it's some kind of victory if you're making a good product, or working on a project that can only help mankind.

When you look at the global situation, if America learned to be one of the many countries in the world and to find its way to cooperate with people and bring a global peace that could bring great prosperity to this globe, there is still a chance of that, and that's a big lesson from history. We are not paying attention to that.

A woman can be very beautiful and an ideal model and she will photograph incredibly well, but she'll appear in film and it won't work. What works is some fusion of physical beauty with some mental field or whatever you call it. I don't know.

When I go to the movies, and I have to sit through ten previews of films that look [alike] and tell the whole story, you know that we've reached an age of consensus. And consensus is the worst thing for us. We all agree to agree. That's where we lose it as a culture. We have to move away from that.

I went to Vietnam, and I was there for a long time. [Using marijuana] made the difference between staying human or, as Michael Douglas said, becoming a beast.