Grave of the Fireflies is an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation... It belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made.

We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars.

Teaching prejudice to a child is itself a form of bullying. You've got to be taught to hate.

Political correctness is the fascism of the 90's, it is this rigid feeling that you have to keep your ideas and your way of looking at things within very narrow boundaries or else you'll offend someone. Certainly one of the purposes of journalism is to challenge just that way of thinking, and certainly one of the purposes of criticism is to break boundaries, that's also one of the purposes of art.

We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.

One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film's defining moments.

From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.