The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright for instance will no longer exist in 10 years.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it's like just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left.

You can't give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you've tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.

I had to resign myself many years ago that I'm not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me it really does.

I can see that if this was an album done 10 or 15 years ago we could see we were moving on to some place else.

I mean don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

I had a couple of movies that I was passionately involved with that I could never get made. 'Richard Pryor ' I wrote for - gosh - over a year. That was close to getting made for two-and-a-half years after that. We're still pushing it you know. It is weird. Suddenly you wake up and it's like 'God five years have gone by.'

Life is short. I'm 47 years old. I've got 10 years to go where I can be the best I can be. I want those 10 years to be precious not like before cranking two or three movies a year. I've made a ton of movies in my life but so what?

Of course for many years directors have had to go on the road with their movies and promote them and I've done that since the beginning. So that's not new but the forms of it are different such as with the internet.

The movies I made when I was 14 or 15 I have a hard time looking at those. Those were the awkward years. I don't know if anybody can look at something they did when they were 14 and not wince.

I never stopped studying Buddhism. In the past few years in between movies I do a retreat.

For a number of years I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be which is stupid.

By the way movies are like sporting events in that you're as good as the movie you're in. You can sit in a room for 20 years and go do a movie and you can just kill in it and you move to the head of the line again. By the same token you can do five movies a year and if they're dreck it's nothing.

I love it man I'm 23 years old and I'm lucky enough to write movies as a job! I just feel really blessed and can't believe it's happening.

I never think it's right to chew gum in front of other people but a lot of times I'll come in for a meeting chewing gum and I'll forget I'm chewing it. Then you don't want to swallow it because it stays in your system for seven years or something so I've asked to throw it away. I've started to wonder if that's why I didn't get certain movies.

Most of the movies I saw growing up were viewed as totally disposable fine for quick consumption but they have survived 50 years and are still growing.

I've been on so many movies. Generally I haven't gotten to be on the ground level. As of two years ago in 'Dear John ' I got to really be on the ground floor. I wasn't a producer. I felt like I put the work in and I did have a lot of sway on what got fixed reshoots so on and so forth. It felt really good.

Even if we die at 100 we're still dying young. I want at least 700 years. There's a lot of travelling and books to read and movies to see. I'm not going to squeeze it all in in 85 years.

I took acting classes in college and once I graduated I decided to give acting a shot when I couldn't really think of anything else to do. It took me a couple of years to get an agent and my first big break was The Fanelli Boys which was a sitcom on NBC. Then I did a few television movies.

I had a daughter who was 9 years old and I had the feeling I wasn't going to be a real parent if I didn't quit making movies for a while and spend time with her. I also felt that I'd made enough movies and said what I had to say at the time.

Over the years with movies I've given directors notes.

The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago and they're all driven by the possibilities of CGI which means you can make anything happen on screen that you can possibly desire.

I remember looking through magazines or watching movies even just a couple of years ago and being like 'I really want to be part of that ' but not realizing what that was.

I think being self-referential is really narcissistic. Who's to say anybody's even thinking of you that much? But some of these movies that I've done people still recite lines to me even 20 years later.