Washington loves movies the way Hollywood loves politics.

Phil Alden Robinson, director of The Sum of All Fears, on the heavy turnout for the movie's world premiere last week in Washington, D.C. The movie, based on Tom Clancy's novel of the same name, is about a terrorist plot to detonate an atomic bomb in the United States.

Animals are only good to be eaten and tested to cure sick people.

TNT basketball analyst and former NBA star Charles Barkley, on People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' opposition to leather basketballs.

People kind of viewed it as black magic, so why understand it?

Charles Phillips, technology analyst with Morgan Stanley, on company executives who spent profligately on technology without clear goals during the tech boom of the 1990s. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that tech spending fell from 4.7 percent of GDP in 2000 to 4.2 percent last year.

It's hard to care deeply for something that might turn on you and eat you

Author Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws and more recently Shark Trouble, which is scheduled to be published this month, on why sharks-although they only "very, very occasionally" attack human beings-are not as well loved as other fish.