KEVIN COSTNER

I haven't tried to buffer myself. I like rolling the dice.

I work for the public, for the people who are paying to go to the cinema, rather than for the critics.

I think there's true drama in the formation of everything that we know and are standing on the shoulders of.

When I played Robin Hood, I knew the great role was Alan Rickman's and it didn't bother me. I always think that leading actors should be called the best supporting actors.

I try to please myself. I don't try to anticipate what people want to see.

I stand up for what I believe. I don't know if it's always paid off for me, because I've been ridiculed and humiliated.

I don't feel the need to direct. I tried to get other people to direct Dances, but they wouldn't do it. They all thought it was too long. One director wanted to cut the Civil War sequence. Another thought the white woman was very cliched.

I don't give up. I'm a plodder. People come and go, but I stay the course.

I've had some movies that have been ridiculed, but that's OK with me. I don't feel that really defines me. Should I change who I am to be popular?

I don't think I'd have been as good as Bruce was. He was a better JFK than I would have been.

If you're willing to tell somebody that you love them, are you also willing to say you're sorry? You need to, even when you think you're in the right.

When I read Thirteen Days I was moved by it. It was just a great time for the world, in terms of looking back in history and seeing how we got ourselves into trouble and how we got ourselves out of trouble.

I like American history.

I was sucked into this vortex of a very conservative upbringing.

I'm proud of all the movies I've made. They're not sequels, they're not franchises. And the reason I pick my films carefully is that I don't want to spit on my life. I like to think of myself as more than that.

We all have that burning question about what happens if we lose somebody we love, especially if we lose them tragically. We wonder what fear was going on, we wonder if we could have reached out and touched them, held their hand, looked in their eyes, been there.

One person doesn't have to shoulder all the responsibility for why a film does or doesn't do well.

I think there are good men and women in all decades. We've grown cynical. And look at what we do to all our heroes: Churchill, FDR, Kennedy, they all had affairs. But heroic things happen every day.

I'm a big fan of dreams. Unfortunately, dreams are our first casualty in life - people seem to give them up, quicker than anything, for a 'reality.'

I split my time between Santa Barbara and Aspen. I live on a pretty fast horse.

I've always known that I'm a little out of vogue.

I think these movies are as much for people of that time as for people who weren't born. For people who weren't born, they see how leaders must act under a crisis situation, not trying to be re-elected or not trying to check polls, that they go from their gut check.

I haven't lived a perfect life. I have regrets. But that's from a lifetime of taking chances, making decisions, and trying not to be frozen. The only thing that I can do with my regrets is understand them.

I've been around where I knew other actors were going to steal the scene, and I don't compete with them.

In America, politicians do whatever to get re-elected, and a lot of decisions that were being made at that time by Kennedy were certain not to get him re-elected.