I don't live anywhere, so that's what's fun about tours.
When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations.
One of the most important but one of the most difficult things for a powerful mind is to be its own master.
Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.
Persons in great stations have seldom their true character drawn till several years after their death. Their personal friendships and enmities must cease, and the parties they were engaged in be at an end, before their faults or their virtues can have justice done them. When writers have the least opportunities of knowing the truth, they are in the best disposition to tell it.
I have often thought, says Sir Roger, it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the middle of Winter.
When I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow: when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind.
In the early 50s in the US, there was what was called McCarthyism and the only reason it succeeded was that there was no resistance to it. When they tried the same thing in the 60s it instantly collapsed because people simply laughed at it so they couldn't do it. Even a dictatorship can't do everything it wants. It's got to have some degree of popular support.
I had a trainer during 'Spiderman,' and I discovered I have deep-seated rage when I'm holding heavy weights over my head. Whatever dormant anger I have in me, that's where it comes out. That's not the kind of working out I want to do.
I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.
Creativity is a voracious animal. It needs to be fed regularly. If you leave it untended for too long, you run the risk of starving your passion and diminishing your spirit.