Ed Burns

Actors are con men and con men are actors. 

And at no point did making 'Brothers McMullen' feel like work or hardship. It was really just a matter of 11 days of fun over the course of 8 months. 

'Brothers McMullen' would not be picked up for theatrical distribution now. 

But at a certain point, you have to take your influence and find your own voice if you want to become a relevant artist. 

But the longer I'm in the business, you see a lot of times these screenplays have been rewritten 5 times and you're not really offending an author. 

I am a big fan of the old Howard Hawks films from the 30s and 40s, I was a big Hepburn and Tracey fan for a while and Woody Allen films that are a very different kind of romantic comedy. 

I feel Irish-Americans are the forgotten minority group. Nobody else is making films about them. 

I mean the cool thing about the movies is that you get to try on these different personalities and different styles. 

I spent four months in Prague in these blue rooms reacting to nothing and you basically place your faith in the hands of the director and the special effects co-coordinator and you keep your fingers crossed and hope that the creatures look really scary. 

I suffer from Irish-Catholic guilt.

I was a kid who went to film school and fell into acting. 

I'd been offered TV series over the years and never had any interest in doing television. I'm not a TV guy. 

I'm always aware of who my core audiences are and I serve that niche. 

I'm betting that in two years I'll be talking to you about a film that I shot on an iPhone. It's absolutely coming, I have no doubt in my mind.

Martin Buber

A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for. 

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. 

An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language. 

For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it. 

God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings. 

I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me. 

Play is the exultation of the possible.

Solitude is the place of purification. 

The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes. 

The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.

There are three principles in a man's being and life, the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I don't do what I say. 

Through the Thou a person becomes I. 

To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin. 

Wilhelm Ostwald

Faced with this general consideration it will immediately be realized on inquiry into the particular position occupied within this general scheme by the scientific field of catalysis that it is in the first stages of its development. 

For, with pure water the inversion of cane sugar scarcely proceeds and subsequently it required very thorough, difficult studies before this effect and its order of magnitude were established. 

In other words, the Church acknowledges Science as the higher authority. 

In specific circumstances the period of aging decline can set in earlier in a particular organ than in the organism as a whole which, in a certain general or theoretical sense, is left a cripple or invalid. 

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the experimental proof for the interdependence of the composition and properties of chemical compounds resulted in the theory that they are mutually related, so that like composition governs like properties, and conversely. 

It has pleased no less than surprised me that of the many studies whereby I have sought to extend the field of general chemistry, the highest scientific distinction that there is today has been awarded for those on catalysis. 

Nowadays, however, we recognize that simultaneously with the typical case of a chemical reaction a typical case of catalytic effect had been studied which constitutes a limiting case. 

Soon afterwards I studied the inversion of sugar in the light of these considerations and immediately found that this classical reaction, too, was determined quantitatively by the same property of the acids, as was of course to be expected from the previous results. 

The development of a rational view of the nature of catalysis was thus absolutely dependent on the creation of the concept of the rate of chemical reaction. 

The distinction between the old and the new formulations consisting in the incorporation of the concept of the rate of chemical reactions is so great that it immediately asserted itself in the objective development of catalysis.

Jim Lehrer

As I say, I'm a discourse advocate. What form it comes is less important to me than the fact that there is discourse. 

Best I can do for them is to give them every piece of information I can find and let them make the judgments. That's just my basic view of my function as a journalist. 

Everyone should get their news however they want to and in whatever form they want. I'm not going to sit back in judgment of other people and the way they do it. 

I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four. 

I started as a print reporter. 

I'm a journalist and that's what I do. 

I'm an expert on the NewsHour and it isn't how I practice journalism. I am not involved in the story. I serve only as a reporter or someone asking questions. I am not the story. 

I'm in the civil discourse business. I think it takes all kinds. And more power to everybody.

If we don't have an informed electorate we don't have a democracy. So I don't care how people get the information, as long as they get it. I'm just doing it my particular way and I feel lucky I can do it the way I want to do it. 

Most of the stories I have covered in 45 years have been gray stories. 

My own view, there is a need for and a demonstrated need for more journalism now than there ever has been. 

On a daily basis there are some huge ones that are, sure, from time to time, but it is helping the reader sort through all this sort of gray stuff out there. 

People can get their news any way they want. What I love about what's happened is that there are so many different avenues, there are so many different outlets, so many different ways to debate and discuss and to inquire about any given news story. 

People can say anything they want to. If they don't want to get the news from me, get it from somebody else. It's not something I'm going to worry about, I'm sorry.

Dean Koontz

A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in. 

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power. 

Although charismatic, James Dean is no Harrison Ford. In the majority of his movies, sooner or later he got the crap beaten out of him. 

Although I've said a million times that I'm not a horror writer, I do like horror. 

Because people see violence on the movie screen, they're not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn't correlate. 

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid. 

Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time. 

Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text. 

Every book has some real life in it. I was never pursued by an evil twin clone, but everything else in MR. MURDER was pretty much out of my own life. 

Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.

I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari. 

I don't find slashing and blood flying everywhere to be scary. I just find it repulsive. 

I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing. 

I have avoided becoming stale by putting a little water on the plate, lying on the plate, and having myself refreshed in a toaster oven for 23 minutes once every month. 

I have been reading Stephen King since CARRIE and hope to read him for many years to come. 

I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence - I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society. 

I like to deal with EVERY aspect of our condition, and that means terror and humor in equal mix. Some books have more room for humor than others. 

Desiderius Erasmus

In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king.

A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie. 

A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit. 

By burning Luther's books you may rid your bookshelves of him, but you will not rid men's minds of him. 

Concealed talent brings no reputation. 

Don't give your advice before you are called upon. 

Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders. 

Everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age? 

Fools are without number. 

Fortune favors the audacious.

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself. 

Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin. 

Great eagerness in the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, or honor, cannot exist without sin. Humility is truth. 

If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen. 

Rod Steiger

And the reason I really appreciated this is because after the picture came out, I was invited by the American Psychiatric Association to give a lecture. I couldn't believe it! 

Anyway, so what he did was, he spread sheets for 100 yards and underneath them he'd put things so there were bumps and different levels and on top he'd put little bushes and if you didn't look to close, it looked like snow! 

He got up and there were both of us in our underwear and this kid goes through the whole thing again, all the closets, the bathroom, everything else and then he left. 

He saved the production a tremendous amount. Now they did the scene where Omar is on the horse and he's in the deep snow, they went to Finland to do that. That scene they went to Finland for a week. I wasn't around then. 

I didn't ever think of it as a social thing at the time. I took it as a good story. Maybe because I've always been kind of progressive so I never thought of it, you know. 

I found out was, by the rhythm of my chewing, how I chewed fast, slow or what have you, I could tell the audience what my character was thinking and feeling. 

I had read the novel and I had heard David Lean was going to direct it - and it came as a surprise to me because American actors, if given the chance, can do style as well as anybody and speak as well as anybody.

If he didn't fall in love he would have never come back near the end of the film. Because, what man is going to dishonor himself so that he comes back in front of the man that took a woman away from him... and warns her to save her life? 

If you see the picture when things get exciting, he chews faster. When he really gets shocked, everything stops, including the chewing. So I worked it in for me. 

Is this a proposal? I'm married now, you know. 

Now that was one thing, but from an actor's point of view, this poor young man, crying from the moment I opened the door to the moment he left. Now if an actor did that they would say he's over-acting.

Salman Rushdie

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now. 

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss. 

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. 

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence. 

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit. 

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable. 

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient. 

Our lives teach us who we are. 

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms. 

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. 

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century. 

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. 

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in. 

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point. 

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important. 

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

Washington Irving

A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all. 

A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles. 

A sharp tongue is the only edge tool that grows keener with constant use. 

A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use. 

A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. 

Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for. 

After all, it is the divinity within that makes the divinity without; and I have been more fascinated by a woman of talent and intelligence, though deficient in personal charms, than I have been by the most regular beauty. 

Age is a matter of feeling, not of years. 

An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather. 

Christmas is a season for kindling the fire for hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.

Great minds have purposes; others have wishes. 

He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart. 

Honest good humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and laughter abundant. 

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories. 

I've had it with you and your emotional constipation! 

It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end. 

Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, shall win my love.

Dave Barry

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing. 

American consumers have no problem with carcinogens, but they will not purchase any product, including floor wax, that has fat in it. 

And so by the fifteenth century, on October 8, the Europeans were looking for a new place to try to get to, and they came up with a new concept: the West. 

As a child, I was more afraid of tetanus shots than, for example, Dracula. 

Auto racing is boring except when a car is going at least 172 miles per hour upside down. 

Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes. 

Bill Gates is a very rich man today... and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions. 

Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business. 

Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear. 

Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!

'Escargot' is French for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm'. 

Eugene is located in western Oregon, approximately 278 billion miles from anything. 

Fishing is boring, unless you catch an actual fish, and then it is disgusting. 

For me, the worst part of playing golf, by far, has always been hitting the ball. 

Geographically, Ireland is a medium-sized rural island that is slowly but steadily being consumed by sheep. 

Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects.

Have you noticed that whatever sport you're trying to learn, some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent?