I like smart movies about smart people, and enjoy it when most of the facts are on the table and we can contemplate them together.

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.

By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.

The moment a man stops dreaming is the moment he petrifies inside.

I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

It's rare to find a film that goes for broke and says, 'To hell with the consequences.'

Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.