“In 26.2 miles, I could have walked to Yankee Stadium and back. I could have walked to Lido Beach on Long Island or Linden, N.J., to Rye, N.Y. (gateway to Connecticut!), to Hackensack or Hasbrouck Heights or through the Lincoln Tunnel and across the Meadowlands to Ho-Ho-Kus. I chose, instead, to walk a marathon without ever being more than 416 feet from my home.”
2. “Surprise! He’s Thriving on Sunshine”
“He is also a workaholic and a perfectionist. When he first started out, he memorized all his songs before writing them down, as a test of their catchiness. Retreating, for him, means about four days without making music. He composes constantly, even on his honeymoon.”
3. “Animal Wrangling in Miniature”
“This may be his first animated film, but his fingerprints are everywhere, from the dollhouse cross sections to the funny-sad family dynamics to the belief that production design is intimately linked with character.”
“She is a muse for me in the sense that a muse is someone who makes you better than you are. I think I am a better director with her, because she believes that I am better than I am, and that blind faith gives me a lot of strength.”
5. “Dickens’s Victorian London Goes Digital”
“If you’ve been looking at my movies over the years, you’ll see that I edit less and less and less. And now I don’t have to edit at all! This is the logical extension of where I’ve been going.”
6. “Eternal Role: A-List Character Actor”
“The hallmark of Mr. Damon’s screen presence is his intelligent physicality, his ability to convey plot points and character psychology through subtle, precise shifts in facial expressions and body language, whether playing the tightly coiled Jason Bourne or the schlumpy Mark Whitacre in The Informant!”
7. “Gumshoes, Dubliners and Deneuve”
“There are two kinds of people in the world, Chaplin people and Keaton people.”
8. “Success Isn’t Only for the Extroverts”
“One day, something clicked for me. I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a popular personality assessment, as part of a team-building program at work. To my surprise, I discovered that I was an introvert — and that this wasn’t a handicap or a disorder, but just an aspect of my personality with its own strengths and challenges.”
“The average dog is about as intellectually advanced as a 2- to 2-and-a-half-year-old child, he has concluded, with an ability to understand some abstract concepts. For example, the animal can get ‘the idea of being a dog’ by differentiating photographs with dogs in them from photographs without dogs.”
“Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished.”
