I loved Westerns for different reasons as an adult. It is not only our only native brand of storytelling - the only one that's not influenced by Europeans and not something that's done better by the French - but I also love the sensuality of the Western. The sights, sounds, and smell of a Western are very exciting.

My mother was a gorgeous person with no vanity, but she was a really good soul.

For me, acting has often been solitary. You're all together, and then boom, you're gone.

There's a certain arrogance to an actor who will look at a script and feel like, because the words are simple, maybe they can paraphrase it and make it better.

I wrote my first song when I was 54 years old.

I take the fact that films cost a lot of money very seriously, but once in a while to have somebody say, This is a big scene, take your time with it, is important. That's John Sayles.

In my business, guys may age, but it's not even a question they're valued. But women my age are supposed to disappear.

I grew up believing in Santa Claus, and we still treat our house at Christmas with a huge reverence for that belief - even though our children are 19 through 23.

I'm real strong, and I'm also real feminine, and I don't find a struggle having those two things under one roof.

There's no strategy involved in my career decisions. I do whatever roles make my heart beat faster.

There's something inside of me that just connects or doesn't connect with the project.

Writing is essentially an internal process.

I got my SAG card on my first movie, 'Goin' South,' with Jack Nicholson in 1978.

I feel like I'm attracted to characters who have one foot firmly planted on the ground. And their heads up in the clouds somewhere. Practical dreamers. They try to impress you that they've got this whole thing figured out, but there's more going on inside their heads than you might imagine.

My son, he has a film group, a bunch of film nerds that sit around and screen movies, and when they had Mary Steenburgen Night, the two movies they screened were 'Melvin And Howard' and 'Clifford.'

Reading is how I became an actor because I didn't grow up in a house where there was an awareness of film or theater. I also grew up in a house full of teachers, so reading was big in our world.

I'm not saying it's easy, and it's definitely harder for women. Because there is definitely a double standard about gorgeous older men, and it's different for older women.

'Step Brothers' was like a reward for going through my whole career and somehow surviving.

I decided if you're lucky enough to be alive, you should use each birthday to celebrate what your life is about.

There's a style to doing period pieces, and you can't do a Western without understanding 'My Darling Clementine.'

If you're not growing, you're dying, and I'm not ready for that.

The way a character sounds is so important to how you're going to play him.

I don't think villains think they are villains.

As a Jew, there's a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It's amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There's a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.