Every man's entitled to hope.

I have several different masks that I wear.

Ego suppression can be an act of ostentation.

Faulkner wrote for film, and his ear is just impeccable.

When I was growing up, it was not the heyday of the western.

I am an instrument of purposes that I don't fully understand.

You want to harbor your resources and try not to make a mistake.

Apes beat their chests so they don't have to fight 24 hours a day.

There is not an amount of money that a writer can earn that I can't blow.

Showbiz and churches are the same thing. You never saw 'The Wizard of Oz?'

I am kind of an undecipherable commodity to a lot of people, including myself.

Deadwood was a place created by a series of accidents. A kind of original sin.

Learning to live with the given is the great humbling educational process of life.

Never believe anything you think about yourself as a writer when you're not writing.

What cops are hired to do is to control people who will not abide by the social contract.

It's kind of an intuitive process. I wish that it were more systematic, but it just isn't.

The whole idea of going out to a movie was really a secularized version of going to church.

Your fundamental responsibility is to stay true to the deepest nature and intention of the materials.

Humility has to do with trying to be a vessel of purposes you're content to understand as not your own.

Time will tell whether I am a wing nut or a megalomaniac. The difference between a cult and faith is time.

The kind of flinching from any form of art or experience that PETA seems to advocate is ultimately life-hating.

That's the definition of love, that going out in spirit to a separate and other soul and being received similarly.

As a writer, I don't have a sense of my own position. I try to disappear and not to think of myself at all when I'm working.

Even having all the time in the world, it's better to collaborate with your brothers and sisters. It's ultimately the richest experience.

When I was a kid, my dad used to take me out to the race track, and so many formative experiences have to do with associations like that.

I've been beaten. I know what that's like. They say, 'Who has been a nail can learn to be a hammer.' So I know what it is to beat people.

The predicate of modern medicine is, 'We invalidate your humanity, but we give you immortality, so you have to shut up and listen to us.'

And if God were trying to reach out to us, and teach us something about the deepest nature of matter, he might use some drugged-out surfers.

For a long time, I felt that was actually the best I could ever hope for - to pretend to be a good person - because I was quite the opposite.

I remember when I was reading 'The Bear,' I was reading as a kid. All these years later, one returns to that for an entirely different reason.

My relationship with the track was, I would say, at least fractionally as complicated as my relationship with my old man. So it kept me coming back.

I think it's disrespectful to go onto a set without some clear idea of what your intentions are, because then you're hanging the director out to dry.

When I was working on 'Deadwood', it was understood that the script was a work in progress, and when we got to set, everyone would kind of work on it together.

To think in terms of what the effect of a story is going to be, as opposed to trying to discover its inner logic, is one of the fundamental dangers in the process.

I try to do the story the way I feel the story should be done, and how that folds into whatever larger sorts of categories or questions is really none of my business.

Commercials were once TV's version of the church. Which is to say, you couldn't offend the sponsor; therefore, certain values had to be underscored in the subject matter.

So much of what we do is shame-based, and when you're teaching, you have the opportunity to answer to the best parts of your nature, so I'm always grateful for that chance.

A person could look at me through ninety-five per cent of my experience and know that I had no shot. Because I was so unreliable. The only thing you could rely on me for was to betray you.

With 'Nostromo', Joseph Conrad said that he had wanted to write a novel about the degradation of an idea. That's what we wanted to show in the case of Dustin Hoffman's character, Bernstein.

I'm not saying I'm wealthy. The best thing that ever happened to me in that context was turning everything over to Rita. And the business people. I am on a leash. That's not the end of the world.

The paradox is that money never meant anything to me. And it still doesn't, except now as an occasion for regret in that there are things that I want to make sure my family is protected when I pass.

Someone asked me, 'How long do you intend to do 'Deadwood'?' And part of my sociopathology, I say, 'Well, when does my contract run out?' And I realize my contract ran out at the end of four seasons.

I had the erroneous conviction that all of history tended toward my birth and would diminish into chaos or inconsequence after I was gone. When you realize that's not so, the proper humility is to defer.

It may be, for one reason or another, if I'm not able to work, that would be a cause for distress. But I'm still pitching. Thank God, I'm still in possession of my gift. And I have the love of my family.

Most races are claiming races. For the lower-caliber horses, it's a way the track has of forcing people to run their horses at approximately the price at which they would not mind having the horse bought.

What constitutes - where are we when we sleep? What is our sense of reality at that moment? It's, you know, science now suggests to us that what has been perceived as matter for a long time is, in fact, energy.

The truth is I try to show up each day available to do the work that God or whatever it is that's making, you know, the solar system work wants me to do. And I expect when he wants me to stop, I'll be the first to find out.

The biggest lie is the idea that we are entitled to a meaningful and coherent summarizing, a conclusion, of something which never concludes. In that regard, this is the lie I'm telling myself so I don't set fire to anything.

My process is very disempowering to the director anyway, so it's essential that you be respectful. Once we've sort of found the scene, I have to get out of there, because you don't want to split the actor's idea of who's in charge.

When someone is good at what he does but is a nonconformist, there is a temptation in horse racing, like in all kinds of other areas of human endeavor, to dismiss him for his nonconformity rather than to recognize him for his excellence.

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