"Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?"

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

"Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up."

"Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that."

"Projecting a persuasive image of a desirable and practical future is extremely important to high morale, to dynamism, to consensus, and in general to help the wheels of society turn smoothly."

"I'm not interested in trying to work on people's perceptions. I am who I am, and if you don't take the time to learn about that, then your perception is going to be your problem."

"I think about my parents all the time, especially on Sunday when I'm at Mass. My mother always said, 'We do not pray to win elections. We pray for people's health, we pray that God's will be done, we pray that we do our best. But we do not pray to win elections.'"

"Stars talk about how they dislike fans fussing over them, begging for autographs and things like that, but deep down inside, they love every minute of it."