If I can play a scene in a master shot, I always prefer it. And the actors always prefer it. It's fun to look at on the screen, the actors get a chance to sink their teeth into something substantial, and it's economically helpful.

I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.

I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats. (On the KKK)

When I started out, I was a television writer, and we wrote a television show that was on live every week. And you didn't have the luxury of coming in and waiting to be inspired. You came in and you had to write. And you wrote, because it was going to be live on the air. So I can do that.

I didn't know he was dead; I thought he was British.

It's funny. Maria Elena and I, we are meant for each other and not meant for each other, it's a contradiction.

People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom.