“Sometimes under-preparation is very good, because it instills fear and fear is galvanizing. It makes you break out of yourself. If you’re prepared, then you think you’re ready, and if you think you’re ready, then you’re not ready.”

— Meryl Streep

(Tonight Show Farewell Speech)
“To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life.
All I ask of you is one thing - and I’m asking this particularly of young people that watch: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere.
Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

— Conan O’Brien

“I always tell my kids if you lay down, people will step over you. But if you keep scrambling, if you keep going, someone will always, always give you a hand. Always. But you gotta keep dancing, you gotta keep your feet moving.”

— Morgan Freeman

(About being in your twenties)

“It’s a question mark decade, in a sense. And we’re told that we should know what we want to do. And it’s a terrible thing. ‘What are you gonna do? What are you gonna be? Well, how can you make a living at that?’ … No, no, no. It’s a question mark. You’re never gonna have this luxury again, of not knowing, and it is a luxury not to know. You can play! You must do that, you must. It’s your only way not to go crazy.”

— Dustin Hoffman

“You learn that the first failure isn’t the end. I thought I’d seen the end of my career 10 times over. I’ve experienced them as death blows. What’s nice - after numerous efforts, successes, failures, losses, professional and personal - is to actually accept you’re not going to ace your life. You suffer, then you get on with it. You may spend three months in bed, but, eventually, you’re going to have to get up.”

— Uma Thurman

“I’m a little bit of an adult and still a bit of a kid. I hope I never lose enthusiasm for things like road trips and Cheerios. I find beauty in unusual things, like hanging your head out the window or sitting on a fire escape.”

— Scarlett Johansson

“I think we are living in selfish times. I’m the first one to say that I’m the most selfish. We live in the so-called ‘first world,’ and we may be first in a lot of things like technology, but we are behind in empathy.”

— Javier Bardem

“It seems I have more talent for filmmaking than for writing a novel, which is my dream. I have always found it easy to let my imagination go. You do not just need imagination for filmmaking, you also need a lot of passion. When I discovered filmmaking as a way of telling stories, I felt that I had found something that was in my nature.”

— Pedro Almodóvar

“There are four questions of value in life… What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for, and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.”
— Johnny Depp

“My heroes were Dylan, John Lennon and Picasso, because they each moved their particular medium forward, and when they got to the point where they were comfortable, they always moved on.”

— John Hughes