With "Good Night, and Good Luck," I think it's kind of obvious what [Truman Capote]'s getting at there, and the importance of how it's playing out today, that is journalism doing, are the journalists doing their job, are they being the other checks and balances in our country that the way that obviously Edward R. Murrow was back then.

When you read, you think, and when you smoke, you think. It's a pleasurable thing, and not a duty.

If you're a human being walking the earth, you're weird, you're strange, you're psychologically challenged.

People aren't going to throw the kind of money at certain people that they used to.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

I try to live my life in such a way that I don't have any regrets. That's probably why I work so much. I don't want to feel I missed something important.

To have that concentration to act well is like lugging things up staircases in your brain. I think that’s a thing people don’t understand. It is that exhausting. If you’re doing it well, if you’re concentrating the way you need to, if your will and your concentration and emotional and imagination and emotional life are all in tune, concentrated and working together in that role, that is just like lugging weights upstairs with your head... And I don’t think that should get any easier.