"I think humans will reach Mars, and I would like to see it happen in my lifetime."

"I didn't start skiing until I was 50. My wife Lois taught me how to ski. I'm proficiently conservative."

"When I was a little kid, we only knew about our nine planets. Since then, we've downgraded Pluto but have discovered that other solar systems and stars are common. So life is probably quite prevalent."

"There's a need for accepting responsibility - for a person's life and making choices that are not just ones for immediate short-term comfort. You need to make an investment, and the investment is in health and education."

"Timing has always been a key element in my life. I have been blessed to have been in the right place at the right time."

"The life expectancy of people going to Mars may be decreased by the higher level of radiation that they receive."

"When we get there, if we don't find any life on Mars, from that point on there will be life on Mars because we'll bring it there, whether it's germs and leftover urine bags, whatever it is."

"My Sunday mornings are spent in a recovery meeting in Pacific Palisades."

"I don't go through life verbalizing what I feel."

"During the divorce process, I lived alone and tended to get extremely down on myself."

"I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory."

"The greatest sci-fis, in my mind, are two things: They're what-ifs - what if this happened, and you get to see it - but they're also these philosophical cautionary tales. They deal with the underlying themes beneath the what-if."

"There's a lot of wisdom that my dad and my grandparents and my uncle have been able to impart on me, and what I've treasured the most is I've seen examples in my life of people embracing their creativity, not feeling insecure about their artistic inclinations."

"When I was seven, I was allowed to be an extra in 'Parenthood,' which was amazing. But then I kind of got addicted to it, and my parents didn't want me to want to act. They felt that would be putting your kid in an adult world."

"I've always had the perspective that roles come into my life when I need them most and sort of teach me lessons. The same can be true of films, films are released into society to aid in a lesson, inspire people, comfort people."

"Life is all beginnings and ends. Nothing stays the same, lad."

"When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him."

"To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves."

"Every perfect life is a parable invented by God."

"Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure."

"Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it."

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life"

"In the third grade, a nun stuffed me in a garbage can under her desk because she said that's where I belonged. I also had the distinction of being the only altar boy knocked down by a priest during mass."

"Pessimism and optimism are slammed up against each other in my records, the tension between them is where it's all at, it's what lights the fire."