Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.

It's an honor putting art above politics. Politics can be seductive in terms of things reductive to the soul.

I guess there are different ways to handle success. You can multiply it financially and use it to multiply your net worth. That's always been very appealing to me.

Criticism challenges current findings. The effort to defend one's position can lead to deeper insights or consideration of options previously not considered.

You work like hell to get yourself ahead in the business. You could go anywhere before, and suddenly you can't go anywhere. It's like being a cartoon character.

I have faith in the pendulum swinging. Right now it's so far against the wall that it can't go any farther; it's gonna start to swing back. That's my optimism. One of the cures is gonna be getting the American people to fully wake up. All the American people, particularly young people, because they're gonna inherit this earth; they're gonna inherit what we're doing.

Right now I am working on something that's pretty important to me. It has to do with my own history in politics. I'd done All the President's Men, and the history of how that came about is a story unto itself. It began with The Candidate. No one knows about that connection. I was on a train, and I was promoting The Candidate going from Jacksonville, Florida, down to Miami to duplicate what candidates in 1972 did.