I have a very long relationship with America. My mother grew up there and I felt to some extent that I partly belong there. I was schooled there briefly for about a year.

There's a lot about the character. It doesn't always happen but there are some characters you really create a relationship with almost as if they were your friend. And you never get into their heads again or think like them.

Look you've got a generation of people coming along who are going to form their own new relationship with the idea of supporting the causes that they care about or changing the world. And these people are not going to do it the way our parents do it.

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then only a few feet away in the cookbook section just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

The whole of science and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here and how do you fit in and what's it all about.

I've always believed in people's capacity for goodness. I still believe that people are good. What I'm not so trusting about anymore is their relationship to their own goodness.

I think the most important thing in life is self-love because if you don't have self-love and respect for everything about your own body your own soul your own capsule then how can you have an authentic relationship with anyone else?

I was in California when this journalist made a blanket statement about the fact that she did not think that black men and women had the kind of love relationship that Rebecca and Nathan had in Sounder.

When you think about it we actors are kind of prostitutes. We get paid to feign attraction and love. Other people are paying to watch us kissing someone touching someone doing things people in a normal monogamous relationship would never do with anyone who's not their partner. It's really kind of gross.

A relationship to me is never about the romance.