If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children things that touch your soul.

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes or a lifetime.

Why are we talking about talking? Why negotiating about negotiating? It's very simple. If you want to get to peace put all your preconditions on the side sit down opposite a table not in a studio by the way.

Are some women and children going to die? Yeah. But it's doing the right thing. You got money you sit around talking about peace. People who don't have money need some help.

I just want you to know that when we talk about war we're really talking about peace.

No matter how calmly you try to referee parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

God created the world the laws of nature were created by God. True science tries to find out what God put in the world. The trouble is where scientists speculate about theology and they don't know what they're talking about because they weren't there. They can't speculate about the origins of life because they weren't there.

Nobody was listening when I learned how to play music. But there's something about being on stage talking to the audience looking at them and smiling that's always been difficult for me. I'm a lot more comfortable now but there are still moments of awkwardness.

You create a community with music not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

I hate talking about music to tell you the truth.

It's difficult to do a genre film well and it doesn't matter if you're talking vampire movies or 'Dawn of the Dead' or 'The Thing' or 'Escape From New York.' Those kind of movies they understand what the old-school B-movie is supposed to be they get the throwback of it.

It's so great in Hollywood now. You have people past 40 sitting and talking about serious stuff writing and making movies and TV but there's laser pistols and superheroes and alien monsters involved. It's viable and mainstream.

I mean the trouble with some of the kind of relationship movies I've done is there's only so many ways you can shoot a conversation. I was really tired of talking heads.

Movies for adults sucked in the 1980s and music for adults sucked even worse whether we're talking about Kathleen Turner flicks or Sting albums the decade's non-teen culture has no staying power at all.

Now there are so many movies so many festivals and so many awards going on each judged with each other like your work is worse than others and that's not fair. How can you tell what's best and what's worst from these awards? We're talking about art.

Before I'd written movies I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.

I like to direct movies but I don't like to goof around for eight years talking about it.