It's hard to give a dramatic shape to even the most dramatic life. . . . you are forced not just into selectivity, but into alteration, distortion and outright lying about what did and didn't happen.

I alternate between feeling incredibly lucky that I've gotten away with almost everything I wanted to do, and feeling like I've been shafted.

The idea that there aren't mistakes made constantly in the judicial system is too obvious even to need to mention.

To have six billion people on Earth, two billion of whom are carrying around a warped view of you? That has to register.

You will never convince anyone to do anything unless you believe it should be done.

Most of my movies get about a third raves, a third vicious attacks, and a third in-between.

[Robert Downey was being singled out for] selective prosecution. He's a sweet guy who never did harm to anyone except himself. He's been doing drugs for 20 years and functioning for 20 years, and in those 20 years there've been hundreds of people who've been getting high constantly and behaved very destructively and have not been arrested. Robert's real problem is he gets caught.

The collaborator has to be someone who understands that his role is to help you articulate what you want, but at the same time is not just going to be mechanically obeying, but adding to, supplementing, and coming up with stuff.

The past is history, the future's a mystery.

Death is a part of life, and eventually I assimilated that completely.