I was raised in New York City and raised in the New York City theater world. My father was a theater director and an acting teacher and it was not uncommon for me to have long discussions about the method and what the various different processes were to finding a character and exploring character and realizing that character.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you desire from what you do. If you are in a job you hate face the fact squarely and get out.

I had come to the point when I realized it was unlikely that my film career was going to move beyond a certain level of role. And I was - because I had graphic instances of it - handicapped by the success of Star Trek. A director would say 'I don't want Jean-Luc Picard in my movie' - and this was compounded by X-Men as well.

My college degree was in theater. But the real reason if I have any success in that milieu so to speak is because I spent a lot of years directing I spent a lot of years behind the camera.

Honesty is the most single most important factor having a direct bearing on the final success of an individual corporation or product.

The ladder of success in Hollywood is usually a press agent actor director producer leading man and you are a star if you sleep with each of them in that order. Crude but true.

Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.

You can manage 50 people through the strength of your personality and lack of sleep. You can touch them all in a week and make sure they're all pointed in the right direction.

The first thing is that we're being attacked by both the Writers Guild and the Producers Guild. Both of these groups are trying to diminish the importance and strength of the director. They're trying to do it through both frontal and side attacks.

Life always rides in strength to victory not through internationalism... but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.

The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions the mobility and flow of risk capital... the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy.

I didn't grow up a theatre kid going to theatre camps. I played sports and that was my main direction. But luckily I never had to choose between sports and theatre.

I remember when I was a little kid I was good at sports and I could jump off the high board. And then puberty hit and suddenly I was looking to boys for direction. I remember that as a great loss.

If I weren't earning $3 million a year to dunk a basketball most people on the street would run in the other direction if they saw me coming.

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

What you're seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they're directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.

The theory of undirected evolution is already dead but the work of science continues.

I'm not being evasive but I am saying I'm not a scientist and I'm not directly involved in the consultation however the science must be sound it must be agreed and the consultation must be of a high quality or no one will have any confidence in the process.

The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war.

Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth and second to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.

Thence results for science as well as for industry the necessity of the division and association of labor. I receive and I give - such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations directly in the abstract.

I hooked up with director Jacques Audiard for this film called 'Rust & Bone' with Marion Cotillard. I loved that experience so much I'm truly sad that it's over!