Whether you're a movie star or doing time in a correctional institute, everybody can have bad judgment, and it's something you have to address. You learn to go on from it. It shouldn't stand in your way. You shouldn't let people continue to throw it in your face.

The media have such a strong hand in deciding what people's perceptions are. They decide what the agenda is going to be, what the issues are.

Francis [Ford Coppola] was on the cover of Time Magazine for One From The Heart and for owning a studio, and he was fresh off of Apocalypse [Now] and The Godfather films, so he was at the absolute top of his game and legend [in The Outsiders ].

There are so many family dinners you can do. I eventually had to go to them and say, 'Look, I don't do spatula work. I don't do scenes with oven mitts. If you're looking for that, you've got the wrong guy. I'm not doing scenes about casseroles. It's not happening.

Sampling, statisticians have told us, is a much more effective way of getting a good census.

[Hank in the Sex Tape] such a fun part. That's how Jake Kasdan and I ended up doing The Grinder together, because we had such a great time on Sex Tape.

I think it was Alfred Hitchcock who said 90 percent of successful moviemaking is in the casting. The same is true in life. Who you are exposed to, who you choose to surround yourself with, is a unique variable in all of our experiences and it is hugely important in making us who we are. Seek out interesting characters, tough adversaries and strong mentors and your life can be rich, textured, highly entertaining and successful, like a Best Picture winner. Surround yourself with dullards, people of vanilla safety and unextraordinary ease, and you may find your life going straight to DVD.