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.

Cyclops, that's like this primal fear. I had dreams for years that the Cyclops was a small creature living in our huge fish tank at home, and at night, it was going to grow to full size and come after me.

Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy.

I try not to repeat a story. I try not to repeat an emotion. I want it to be all sort of new for the viewers and to challenge myself as a writer, so there's always pressure. What else can you come up with?

What does it mean for an actor to make a part his own? It means that he takes on what you had intended and starts to put in his own stuff so that it becomes something that could only happen if he played it.

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

It's easy in a novel to be completely unambiguous about the relationship between animal and daemon simply by stating it outright; whereas you get very few opportunities to do this in an elegant way in a film.

Their argument is that most shows are losers, which is true, but it's also disingenuous to say, 'We are not going to take the risk unless it is totally covered by the few successful shows that are out there.'

I grew up in the suburbs, and I listened to hip-hop for the right reasons, which was to understand a culture that was beyond mine, and to understand what was going on in places outside of my sheltered bubble.

I like the idea of what happens when someone tells a small white lie - which I think is the premise of the show - and how it has ripple effects, so really it's also about raising the stakes of this little lie.

All my businesses are scrupulously legal. Not because I have any moral problems with crime. It just makes my life easier to obey the law. Crime is for poor people; you don't need to rob the bank if you own it.

Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books that is about how amazing books are and how amazing the people who write books are. Writers love writing books like this, and for some reason, we let them get away with it.

When most people become president, even if you disagree with their ideology, you can still agree that they would have the competence to run something... With Trump, I do not have the confidence of that at all.

When I did 'Sex and the City,' it was like, 'Let's do a comedy where the humor is not coming from innuendo but from the a truthful place. This is a show where we're going to be able to say and do what we want.'

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.

There's tons of creative people in television that have one failure after another, and they just step up higher. I could never get over that. When I had a failure, there was no such thing as just getting over it.

If you're going to vote on a television contract, there is a certain rationality to saying that the same structures that are applied to Health Plan participation should be placed on the right to vote on a strike.

We, Catholics, share many of the moral guidelines of Mormons, the difference is you guys take it seriously. When the church says something we don't agree with we say, "Oh don't be so crazy." We just laugh it off.

The beauty behind killing someone who no one thinks you're willing to kill is, of course, that you throw people out of their comfort zone. And that's good because you want people to be on the edge of their seats.

Sometimes confidence can lead you to accept the first decent idea instead of to really strive to even discard that and go for the ultimate great idea. So in a weird way, I think confidence is overrated sometimes.

Theater is a wonderful medium - I love theater myself, and there are exceptions to every rule - but the thing that motion pictures can do that theater cannot is that in movies, you don't have to rely on dialogue.

There's nothing more exciting than to have a project that you like, that you're proud of, and you're waiting for that validation for the world to see it and say, "Yeah! You know what? That was pretty damn funny!"

When you're doing a single-camera show, it's more buying into a level of reality. I think a sitcom, a four-camera show, doesn't require that so much. I think with a film show, you just need the characters to grow.

There was an interesting article in Los Angeles Magazine about women directors. A woman director makes one bad independent film and her career is over. Guys tend to get an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

There was no doubt that there was a vast organization which was making fools of all the liberals in Hollywood and taking their money, that there was a police state among the Left element in Hollywood and Broadway.

My mom would be leaving the house and she'd say, 'Don't you pull out all of the old dresses in the attic and put on a show again!' And the door would close, and that's exactly what I'd do. The show was calling me!

A friend of yours has, I think, a huge collection of sock monkeys. I'd love to show those. When I go to people's homes and I see the little things they're obsessed with, I wonder why no one has ever exhibited them.

I do believe that the Mormon Church is at kind of an awakening, in two different ways: More people are becoming aware of it, and it's becoming a force to be reckoned with. There's a lot of Mormon converts globally.

They [comic books] are not a genre, they are not something to get hot and cold from one year to the next, they're the exact same thing as books and plays: they are a source of great stories and colorful characters.

I hate the Communists and have for many years and don't feel right about giving up my career to defend them. I will give up my film career if it is in the interests of defending something I believe in, but not this.

Any voting group has an interest that they want from politicians. That's why politicians have to talk to different people. But to reduce the black interest to free stuff is so insulting. It just makes me apoplectic.

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

Life experience is what defines our character, even if it means getting your heart broken or being lied to. You know, you need the downs to appreciate the ups. Going on the adventure or taking that risk is important.

When you come into the industry as an outsider, you need to have an entrepreneurial spirit to succeed. In Hollywood, it's very clear that you either play by the rules or make up your own. And I wanted to do it my way.

In general, I think writing characters, no one is 100 percent good or bad, and certainly, the bad characters never think they're bad themselves. Even the worst characters don't feel like they're bad guys on the inside.

When it went on the air, the sales department hated it. It was the highest advertising pullout show in the history of NBC. At the early focus groups, people were saying, 'Who are these people? Why should we watch them?

'Coraline' is Neil Gaiman's book, it sold a lot, it has a big fan base. It was originally conceived to be live action, but I never really wanted it to be. I always thought that it would work better as an animated film.

When you have somebody like a Donald Trump - he made no bones about trying to disprove Barack Obama's Americanism in trying to make him out to be some foreigner that was born in Kenya. I thought that to be very racist.

Adults sometimes think children don't think. That's what propels them to order children around. But children do integrate thoughts and make sense of them. When I was a child, I thought about everything in the universe.

I was always the kid who wanted Christmas to not come, because I realized at a pretty early age that no matter what you got, there's always a little bit of a letdown. It's like, 'Oh, gee, I wanted two ponies, not one.'

The closest I came to doing anything that I wanted to do was to try and check and see what industries were just starting out. There was plastics and television, and I figured television had to be more fun than plastics.

I actually started in the opposite place. I come from a technical background - I'm a mathematician and a programmer by trade - and I was one of those people who would watch a show and say, "Oh, that could never happen."

If we don't hope, if we don't stay positive - at least about love, or finding love - then the rest of life becomes really just painful to think about, because for the most part, you know, day-to-day stuff is monotonous.

It's a presidential [election] year [2016], certainly everyone is talking about it, but if the history of the show tells us anything, the Big Brother cast does not usually discuss political issues like that in the house.

I tend to look at the world more from Voltaire's perspective. Incidentally, if you haven't read Candide lately, it's a fabulous book. It's riotously, laugh-out-loud funny in a way that no Shakespeare comedy will ever be.

It was the Cosby issue that made me realize how much I really cared about women's issues and how much I realize it's important for me to be an advocate for issues that aren't necessarily my own, to be an ally for issues.

I never did theater. I was a theater major at USC my first year because I didn't get into the film school. I was biding my time, hoping to be accepted to film school, and I ended up transferring to UCLA my sophomore year.

As a director, I'm not the one animating every frame, every shot. I'm moving around like a surgeon on rounds, or a farmer checking in on all the plants being grown, pruning and adjusting. For me, it's a very exciting job.

That's the great thing about a series: you're driving to work, and you have an idea for a story for your characters, and you can go into work, and it's gonna be a television show. I mean that's what's great about the job.

When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.

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