High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth still mysterious forces.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature and poetry and all that is spiritual.

At the time I came along Hollywood's idea of teen movies meant there had to be a lot of nudity usually involving boys in pursuit of sex and pretty gross overall. Either that or a horror movie. And the last thing Hollywood wanted in their teen movies was teenagers!

There's this index that tallies up how much your movies have made and if they haven't grossed a certain amount then you're not bankable. I know I'm not Will Smith but you know my ranking's pretty low. The only studio picture I've done is 'Zodiac ' and that didn't perform that well.

Last year when 'Black Swan ' 'True Grit' and 'King's Speech' all grossed over $100 million it gave studios and independent financiers the confidence to make daring movies and not do the same old you-know-what.

I'm not bragging but my movies have grossed well over a billion dollars.

And it was back in the mid-1980s and as I point out in a piece that was when we are spending about eight percent of our gross domestic product on health care. And even then we had the impression that so much of the excessive aggressive medical treatment that took place at the end of life was not only unnecessary but it was cruel.

I am much more open to plural marriage than I was before and I now support it in certain situations. I do believe it is right for some people. But our example in America today is gross abuse - I can't support it in fundamentalist compounds.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

Instead California is one of only 10 states that provides in-state college and university tuition to illegal immigrants. That's grossly unfair to a legal high school student who moves out of California for a year then returns to attend college.