If you're lucky enough to do well, it's your responsibility to send the elevator back down.
Kevin Spacey
Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they'll more likely pay for it rather than steal it. Well, some will still steal it, but I think we can take a bite out of piracy.
If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart; if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!
We're all victims of our own hubris at times.
You have to always be ready, always be alive, and always be willing to move in a new direction.
Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get.
One of the tasks that any artistic director has is, you're trying to bring elements together that will work. The truth is that you could bring all the best talents in the world together and produce a big turkey.
People have different reasons for the way they live their lives. You cannot put everyone's reasons in the same box.
I'm supposed to convince you, for two hours, that I'm somebody else. Now if you know everything about my life, if you think you've got me figured out and you think you know all my dark secrets, how am I ever going to convince you that I'm somebody else?
There are good people in the lobbying industry. Lobbyists can serve a very useful purpose.
I always thought that, in a way, you want your Superman to be a total unknown.
After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley.
You learn every single day when you're running a company. You learn as you go.
The fact is that HBO is doing the kind of films and the kind of stories that the movie industry used to do. You look at a lot of the specialty sections of studios that have gone under... and there's no doubt in my mind why filmmakers and screenwriters and actors are ending up at a place like HBO. They do it better than anybody.
Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of 'House of Cards' at once, proved one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge as they've been doing on 'House of Cards' and lots of other shows, we should let them binge.
I have to remember if I'm at some charitable event where kids are... I try to remember don't swear in front of the kids!
When you're just able to distill it down to the idea and the feeling that a character is experiencing in a scene, it can become very, very razor sharp and really clean and really efficient and simple. And sometimes it takes twenty-five years to learn how to be simple.
I would love to do much more singing; it's just one of those things where I can't quite describe what it feels like when you're standing in front of a forty piece orchestra, and there's nothing between you and an audience but a microphone. It's like strapping yourself to a locomotive, and I love it.
There are ways in which you can make sure that even if people come to the theatre because they know an actor or actress, by the end, they've forgotten that, and they leave going, 'Wow - what an amazing play.'
I don't care about my personal acting career anymore. I'm done with it. After 10 years of making movies and doing better than I ever could have imagined, I sort of had to ask myself: 'What am I supposed to do with all of this success that I have had?'
I have always believed that the risk takers are eventually rewarded.
Meeting the person you are going to be playing is very unique.
The only real experiences I've had with therapists were the ones who were working with me and my family when my mother was ill.
For kids growing up now, there's no difference watching 'Avatar' on an iPad or watching YouTube on TV or watching 'Game of Thrones' on their computer. It's all content. It's just story.
I'm aware that, from the outside, this looks like I've got quite an ego.
Have we become so celebrity-obsessed that there is no longer a difference between a character and an actor? I hope not.
President Obama will go down as having passed some of the most historic bills in the history of this country.
If you look back through history in the United States, there have been very few landslide elections. Half the country always voted for someone else.
As a producer or financier, you are going to go where you get the best bang for your buck.
I'm not going to make general comments about the British press.
I don't watch rugby.
Partisan rancour and party politics and ideology have got in the way of compromise - and compromise is the only thing that has ever made politics successful.
The relationship with the cast has everything to do with how a performance develops, and in a sense that while you're discovering a play in the course of rehearsal with the director, you're also discovering it with your fellow actors. We're all in it together.
Both 'Consenting Adults' and 'Glengarry Glen Ross' revolve around the economic stresses of the '90s. They are about what people do when they're pushed against that wall, and how they're manipulated. They are both morality tales, though in very different genres.
When I was young, I learned very early on that I could make my mother laugh. And that was one of the greatest sounds I ever heard.
Life's all about perceptions.
I write a lot about my experiences and the people I meet. I've got a lot of material. But a book about me? It seems sort of odd.
Am I now supposed to go on Oprah and cry and tell you my deepest, darkest secrets because you want to know?
The process of doing a play is an organic one, and the process of doing a film is totally inorganic.
My admiration for 'Mary Tyler Moore' is very, very big because they went out on top.
The stigma that used to exist many years ago, that actors from film don't do television, seems to have disappeared. That camera doesn't know it's a TV camera... or even a streaming camera. It's just a camera.
What's my favourite book? It changes all the time.
I believe if you go to a movie theatre, and you see something you think is incredible, if you walk out of the theatre and there was a bin in the lobby of DVDs of the film you just watched, you would buy four of them - one for you and three for your friends.
Why not sit around a Beverly Hills pool collecting residual cheques? That is not the kind of life I want.
Sometimes the person who is the most logical is the person whom we call insane.
I am so leading the life that I want and wanted and dreamed of as a kid. I'm trying very hard not to abuse it or take advantage of it.
Whether that's positive or not, people are talking about the Old Vic Theater again with passion and commitment and controversy and debate.
It's always the big question in our lives if you have a lot of success. What do you do with it? Buy more houses, buy more cars, buy more stuff, be wealthy and distant and unengaged? Or do you take all that good fortune that has come towards you and spread the love, do something with it?
I'm attracted to things that are challenging and fun and interesting, and it certainly seems that audiences enjoy them as well.
In film, movies' schedules are based on three things: actors' availabilities, when are sets being built, when you can rent the place you're going to film in.
