Children, I always think, are just putting on a performance of being naive and not understanding anything. I have worked with children in films, and they're treated as adults and they just drop the pretense of being children.

Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.

Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful; to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they'd probably throw you out. That's very hard.

I grew up. I began to think the United States had some problems that really required the help of artistic people to solve. And I gave myself permission to be a writer instead of a civil servant.

I had never created my own business before. I had always been the gun to hire... But I had to finally say, nobody is going to give me my dream job, so I better figure it out myself.

My parents started a business out of the living room of our home and, 30-plus years later, it was a multimillion dollar company. So, President Obama, with all due respect, don't tell me that my parents didn't build their business.

When I moved back home, I took the initiative to involve my entire family in my career because I didn't find that anyone else was as passionate and thorough.

Usually, people that I like to work with are people that I believe in more than they believe in themselves, and they just need that extra boost and the person to give them a little more time and understanding and introspection into their own character to find that box office that lives inside of them.