Whenever an earthquake or tsunami takes thousands of innocent lives, a shocked world talks of little else.

In the middle of my third Hollywood picture The Magician, the earthquake hit Hollywood. Not the real earthquake. Just the talkies.

I couldn't help but be impressed by the magnitude of the earthquake.

People shouldn't be living in certain places - on earthquake faults or on flood plains. But they do, and there are consequences.

Already 2008 has proved a tumultuous year in terms of global perceptions of China, and there are still 59 days to go until the Beijing Olympics. The tragedy of the Sichuan earthquake followed hard on the heels of the riots in Tibet and the demonstrations surrounding the Olympic torch relay.

If one introduces the concept of energy of an earthquake then that is a theoretically derived quantity.

I'm a doer, and whether it was the tsunami in Sri Lanka or the earthquake in Indonesia, I was always saying, 'I should be there; I should be helping out.'

We want a story that starts out with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax.

And in rural communities we've worked alongside, Haitians are doing far more than merely recovering from the earthquake. Many are creating long-term sustainable change.

The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.

In the harrowing aftermath of Haiti's earthquake, one of the greatest needs became desperately clear: safe water.

We don't suggest that because San Francisco lies on top of an earthquake fault that it should be moved.

In every area of the world where there is earthquake risk, there are still many buildings of this type; it is very frustrating to try to get rid of them.

As seismologists gained more experience from earthquake records, it became obvious that the problem could not be reduced to a single peak acceleration. In fact, a full frequency of vibrations occurs.

Each year, at the typical nuclear reactor in the U.S., there's a 1 in 74,176 chance of an earthquake strong enough to cause damage to the reactor's core, which could expose the public to radiation. No tsunami required.

What struck me first on reading the Ten Hoeve-Jacobson paper was how small the consequences of the radiation release from the Fukushima reactor accident are projected to be compared to the devastation wrought by the giant earthquake and tsunami.

Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.

It is crystal clear to me that if Arabs put down a draft resolution blaming Israel for the recent earthquake in Iran it would probably have a majority, the U.S. would veto it and Britain and France would abstain.

In an earthquake, I shouldn't run out of the house - I should run into it.

I experienced the California Northridge Earthquake of 1994 and the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, and I have thus seen firsthand how terrible and awesomely devastating a force of nature can be.