I always like to play with my kids. I always have the time to do that. That's my priority, always has been, so just interacting with my kids, and being with them is great.

Everybody who works for Amblin Television has to do five jobs.

Everybody loves a winner, but nobody loves a winner.

In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who's never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don't look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.

I wanted to do another movie that could make us laugh and cry and feel good about the world. I wanted to do something else that could make us smile. This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.

I wouldn't have filmed The Color Purple if the book had been a big fat novel. The reason I read it is because it is thin.

All of my movies are about how I wish the world would work. I've made very few movies about how the world worked. I could name them on one and a half hands, about how my movies have been very reflective of how the world was exactly. A lot of my movies are really about the way I wish the world was, and that's what this whole art form is all about. It's an interpretive art form.