There's nothing American tourists like more than the things they can get at home.

Nothing reassures parents more than surrounding their kids with the kind of guys who have a lot of weapons and nothing to do on weekdays.

There is a residual sense for me, having grown up in the early '70s, that I did not know I had, which was a sense that the military are different than I. Because there was such a divide between the military world - and there still is, because there's no draft - and the civilian world is one of the rotten harvests of the Vietnam War, was this sort of bifurcation of America in that way.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies

I can't prove it, but I can say it.

I imagined myself living in New York in some sort of open, large but sparse studio apartment with a lot of blond wood and a futon on the floor and a bubbling samovar of tea in the background and a big beard - living alone but with my beard - and doing theater. That's what I thought my life would be.

My character is self-important, poorly informed, well-intentioned but an idiot. So we said, `Let's give him a promotion.'