"I'm not the most loathsome man in the world. I've dropped to number nine."

"The first thing that I really understood politically and was old enough to get was the failed assassination attempt on Reagan."

"I knew I had to get out of Boston and stop making movies there, at least for one movie, otherwise no one would ever consider me for a movie that took place south of Providence."

"I like roundtables because you can talk more directly to people. And you also can get kind of a vibe on what a journalist's take is on something, and have a conversation with them more."

"You get old, you slow down."

"I'm a writer. An amateur photographer. An actor."

"What happens is this sort of bleed-over from the tabloids across your movie work. You go to a movie, you only go once. But the tabloids and Internet are everywhere. You can really subsume the public image of somebody."

"I've never held myself up particularly high when I had movies that worked, and I never held myself all that low when I had failures."

"The first 'Star Wars' movie had come out in 1977 and had become this huge phenomenon with all the toys and everything - it just kind of swept America. But internationally, it was also a big deal."

"Sometimes I get insecure about being a real director because I look at the great directors, and they have such command. But maybe that keeps me critical of myself. Maybe it keeps me moving forward."

"I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically."

"The first day of 'The Town' was one of the most satisfying days of my career."

"There's a lot of noise in the world, and the Internet magnifies that energy."

"I grew up in a house with a mother who was a teacher and a Freedom Rider - very left-wing Democrats living in a heterogeneous working-class neighborhood. I picked up a lot of those values there, and I brought them with me when I showed up in Hollywood."

"There's something really great and romantic about being poor and sleeping on couches."

"All I do, really, is go to work and try to be professional, be on time and be prepared."

"God help me if I ever do another movie with an explosion in it. If you see me in a movie where stuff is exploding you'll know I've lost all my money."

"The trap for an actor is that you become too successful at what you're trying to do, and you can find yourself stuck there."

"My movies are unadorned, they're not particularly fancy, I think they're kind of workmanlike in some ways, focusing on the writing and the acting."

"When I watch a guy I know is a big Republican, part of me thinks I probably wouldn't like this person if I met him, or we would have different opinions."

"I went to the University of Vermont because I had a kind of unrequited love for this high school girlfriend. She wasn't even at the University but at another school nearby. But I thought if went to a school near her, just maybe... I was really remedial about girls in so many ways."

"I find forgiveness to be really healthy."

"Sometimes I wish I had never met you, because then I could go to sleep at night not knowing there was someone like you out there."

"Sure, I suffered a lot. But it's not like the end of the world and it's not who I am. I lead quite a pleasant life and I'm able to divorce a perceived reality from my actual experience of life."