"I thought, eh, I'll be dead in three years."

Tuesday, August 5, 2008 | 1:27 PM

The world in quotes:

"This was like three years ago. And I thought, eh, I'll be dead in three years. So I said OK. And then I didn't die."
--Woody Allen on how he ended up directing an opera, at E! Online.

"It's the big action ones or the ones with Will Ferrell. In those you howl for two hours and you feel like you get a six-pack [of ab muscles] from all the laughs!"
--California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on his moviegoing choices, at the LA Times.

"I'd love to say that I invented and meticulously crafted that. But it was entirely Mike Judge's creation. Again, it was me being a halfway decent mimic. It's based on a cartoon Mike did in the early '80s, where the only two characters were Lumbergh and Milton, and Mike did the voice. So I saw it before I met him for the part. So I just went in doing an imitation of Mike, and he seemed to like that."
--Gary Cole on the creation of "Office Space"'s Bill Lumbergh, Onion AV Club.

" 'The Love Guru' didn't work well because Mike Myers addresses a teenage audience, and he was trying to mix it up with metaphysics. Humor mixed with spirituality can work, if it's done well. But frankly speaking, this was not a good attempt."
--Deepak Chopra on why "The Love Guru" didn't work, at MTV.

"Samantha Morton, of course."
--Emily Watson on who would play her in a film of her life, at Guardian. In "Synecdoche, New York," she plays the actress hired to play Samantha Morton's character. You know?

[Photo: Woody Allen filming "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," Weinstein Company, 2008]