I gotta keep busy. I'm not happy unless I'm working on two, three things.
I wanted to make it in New York. I thought if I went out to the Midwest, I'd be burying myself. But I was wrong.
It's murder to doubt yourself in life. It took until I was 45 to get to that point. As hard as it is in your work, it's harder in your life. But it can be done.
TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn't use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not. People think they have to have an answer for everything because the guys on TV have an answer for everything.
Something I miss terribly from the '60s - the most important phrase in the English language was, 'I got hung up.' Somebody says they got hung up, it's unassailable, you know? You don't go near that. Whoa! I know what that can be like.
I'm used to changing a lot of the dialogue. But if I feel like the script is working, I don't want to mess with it.
I'd have to say that my favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning. 'Little Miss Sunshine' is like that. That's my fave genre, if I had to pick one.
Over the years, I played with a couple of spectacular guitar players, and playing with them has made me play better than I knew how to play. I hope the same thing is true with acting.
My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.
I don't know what I'm proudest of. The fact that my kids still talk to me.
NI love watching science fiction because I feel like when it's done well, it's not just monsters, but philosophy. Really good science fiction like, '2001,' for example, or the first 'Matrix.' But it takes someone who's got a brain and thinks in order to do really good science fiction.
It's - everybody's looking at the bottom line all the time, and failure doesn't look good on the bottom line, and yet you don't learn anything without failing.
I don't mind watching plays once in a while, but as long as I don't have to be in them.
I don't like improvising on camera, particularly, but very often, a scene will not be working, and you rehearse it once or twice, and you realize something's missing. So I'll play with it until it makes sense.
I was terrified of being on stage, and I had to work very hard at a craft to get past that.
I did a couple of movies in Brazil, and the actors were incredibly congenial and hung out together a lot. Even the biggest stars would do radio commercials - they're not put on a pedestal like they are in the United States.
A director without a vision is a catastrophe.
I'm not sure if I've learned anything from show business. Life in general has taught me if you're kind to people, everything gets easier. Being a decent person really smoothes the way for you and everyone else.
I never had a better role than I had in 'Little Miss Sunshine.' That was one of my favorite roles ever.
Education does not mean jamming information into somebody's head. Rather, it's that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.
