Storytelling helps us understand each other, translate the issues of our times, and the tools of theater and film can be powerful in helping young people to develop communication/collaboration skills, let alone improving their own confidence.

I'm always taken aback by things that are successful that I think are just crap, and then I'm completely surprised when things I do end up being successful because you walk into things and you never know... It's just really remarkable.

As long as we, in the United States, continue to insist that our politicians have to spend all of their time raising millions of dollars for television ads, it will be corrupt. If we leave it up to the politicians to clean up lobbying and finance reform, nothing is going to change.

I believe this: If an actor wants a role or wants to work with somebody, then you do everything within reason to try to get that role. If they want you to audition, you audition. If they want you to screen-test, you screen-test. If they want you to come and tap-dance in their hallway, you tap-dance in their hallway.

If you go out eight times and play tennis eight times this week, yeah, it's the same rules, but it's a different game every time you're out on that court. You're working on a different part of your game every time you're out on that court; your partner's working on a different part of their game, and the act of being watched changes it.

I was terrible in my first play. After that experience, I had to face that I wasn't good enough to play with the big boys. I had to go away and learn, so I worked in regional theater for three years. I even understudied at the Kennedy Center.

I never wanted to go to the Old Vic and not have it survive long after I was gone. It's not about me; it's about that theater. And the more that it's able to grow and do everything it should do without me, then I've done my job.

When you're just able to distill it down to the idea and the feeling that a character is experiencing in a scene, it can become very, very razor sharp and really clean and really efficient and simple. And sometimes it takes twenty-five years to learn how to be simple.

I believe if you go to a movie theatre, and you see something you think is incredible, if you walk out of the theatre and there was a bin in the lobby of DVDs of the film you just watched, you would buy four of them - one for you and three for your friends.

I have long been a supporter of The Prince's Trust, and so when American Express asked me to launch 'Amex Be Inspired' and help young people build their confidence and fulfil their potential, I was delighted to get involved.

I think that what is truly unfortunate is when an entire party makes a decision that they're going to block every single thing that a president wants to accomplish. It's very - it's very hard to get anything done in those circumstances.

It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime...

For you, a thousand times over

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.

Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.

It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated...

There is a way to be good again...

There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything

Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.

People say that eyes are windows to the soul.

It's a funny thing... but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.

A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.

They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.

I will follow you to the ends of the world.

Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.

It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir

Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.

She is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart.

You changed the subject." "From what?" "The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy." "You know." "Know what?" "That I only have eyes for you.

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything.

War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace." - Baba

I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.

In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things.

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.

Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.

Some stories don't need telling

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.