"I'm the least metrosexual cat you've ever met. I've never had my fingernails or toenails done, and I've cut my own hair longer than other people have cut my hair."

"On an awards-show day, I can play basketball, go in, take a shower and put on a tux - it takes me three minutes to put on a tux - and be out the door in 15 minutes."

"Growing old on screen is not for the faint of heart."

"There's a certain cruelty to being on a big screen as your eyelids start to sag and your hair falls out and turns gray that you either have to be able to handle or not. What you can't do is try to force yourself into roles that you could have played or would have played ten years earlier."

"I've walked with very famous people down red carpets over to the crowd of thousands of people, and you'll reach out to shake their hand and they've got a camera in their hand. And they don't even get their hand out, because they're recording the whole time."

"'Ides of March' I did for scale - scale as a director, scale as an actor, scale as a writer."

"I enjoy living in a nice house and having a nice life. So I do two or three commercials overseas a year to sort of fill in, because they pay pretty well."

"My life isn't focused on results. My life is really focused on the process of doing all the things I'm doing, from work to relationships to friendships to charitable work."

"Hosting is work. It means you don't get to go up to your room and disappear and take a nap. Like everybody else does after lunch. I'm talking about hosting, not hosting a dinner party, but hosting people staying in your home."

"I can't give you 150 takes. I can't even give you 30 different ways of doing it! I don't have the talent or the range for it."

"I watch 'Batman & Robin' from time to time. It's the worst movie I ever made, so it's a good lesson in humility."

"It's not that I lead this oblivious life where I think I've got such a great personality that people want to spend time with me. If someone has a poster of you or asks for your autograph, clearly you can't take them out on a date. It's not that interesting if someone is just interested in you."

"I'm kind of comfortable with getting older because it's better than the other option, which is being dead. So I'll take getting older."

"Honestly, as you can imagine, it really isn't all that fun directing yourself, running back and forth to the monitors to see if you're terrible or not."

"I just think there are a lot of celebrities who don't feel that they have a voice. A lot of actors come from a place of fear, and that's just a general statement about actors. You're terrified the casting director won't like you, you're terrified the producer won't like you, you're terrified the director won't like you, and on and on."

"When you first start out as an actor, you're just looking for a good part. As time goes on, if you're being held responsible for the movies themselves, you're looking for a good script all around."

"I've certainly done some turkeys along the way and made some dumb choices in my career, mostly early on. I'm one of the lucky ones who got to make a lot of mistakes very early when no one was paying attention."

"I did a lot of terrible TV shows and was really terrible in them, and I've done terrible films I was terrible in, but nobody really noticed."

"I've had some success at writing and directing, and I like it. It's infinitely more creative than just acting, and I have things I want to say and do."

"I don't believe in happy endings, but I do believe in happy travels, because ultimately, you die at a very young age, or you live long enough to watch your friends die. It's a mean thing, life."

"My biggest fear is doing the same things 10 years from now. That would be a failure. It's something you have to constantly reassess, and asking yourself what you are going to do next makes it a good, long full journey."

"Shutting down the government is not how you make government work."

"I was very lucky to get well known much later in life. You need to have flopped quite a few times to get a sense of how little any of it has to do with you."

"Fame can be very dangerous, because you can start to enjoy that part of it. And that's not the good part of what I do for a living. The good part is the making of films. The unpleasant part is the fame part, if you're not careful."

"I certainly direct with confidence even if I'm not confident. I learned early on as an actor that confidence can be faked, and it's not always a terrible thing to do. A lot of times if people feel you're confident, then they're confident."

"I do happen to have a good life... But I also like to work. I feel like I got the brass ring and I got very lucky in this."

"I think the reason why a lot of young people are such screw ups... is oftentimes they didn't have the luxury I had of forming important relationships and opinions and life experiences before having success."

"It's very easy for people to be critical of President Obama's first term, but let's face it, he didn't exactly inherit the country in the best shape."

"The only failure is not to try"

"If I had been with all the women that I was said to have been with, I wouldn't have had the time to shoot a single movie!"

"I love my grey hair and wrinkles. I love the fact that my face has more of an edge and more character than it did when I was in my twenties and thirties. No Botox for me."

"My father ran for Congress in 2004, and I got a sense that there is no way to achieve much "success" without a certain amount of compromise."

"If we turn our heads and look away and hope that it will all disappear then they will - all of them, an entire generation of people. And we will have only history left to judge us."

"Anytime there's an actual grassroots movement that isn't funded by people trying to create a grassroots movement, I find that interesting."

"I'm really white trash."

"I've been left for someone...all those things...It was sometimes a surprise, and sometimes you saw t coming. The most painful was when I kept trying to get someone back. But we all make dumb mistakes."

"On Christmas morning, before we could open our Christmas presents, we would go to this stranger's home and bring them presents. I remember helping clean the house up and putting up a tree. My father believed that you have a responsibility to look after everyone else."

"Having 'Oscar winner' on your tombstone is a great thing."

"I don't tweet, I don't go on Facebook. I think there's too much information about all of us out there. I'm liking the idea of privacy more and more."

"We're in a tight spot!"

"I like owning dirt. You know, I spent a lot of time broke when I moved to California. So deep in my soul is still this idea of being unemployed. To me, owning land means you could sell it at some point and have money."

"I like paper."

"Republicans are good at standing by their candidate."

"I think anyone who is famous is a moron if they're on Twitter. It's just stupid."

"I grew up in a family of storytellers, but Google has destroyed us because you can fact-check everything. We'd always like the stories to be a little better than they were."

"One of my favorite films is 'Big Fish,' which I think is a masterpiece."

"You can't legislate good taste."

"You don't want to try to look younger, because you'll look wrong. You dye your hair, you look wrong. You wear a bad toupee, you look wrong. You wear makeup to hide things, you get your eyes done, you look wrong."

"I believe in all the qualities of being a liberal. I keep going back to all the great social events in our country's history, starting with the Salem witch trials, where the conservative view was that they're witches and should be burned at the stake, and the liberal view was there's no such thing as witches."

"I think one of the major misconceptions about me is that I live my life the way people think I lead my life, with hot and cold drinks running everywhere and a party all the time. They think of my life in terms of certain excesses that don't really exist. Things are actually fairly simple."