Actor Quotes

As an actor, to go and see those shows - great plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and Clifford Odets's 'Golden Boy' - it's so exhilarating. I'd personally love to perform the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story.' He's a transient, lost soul, and an example of humanity at its raw

You know, because of the lack of budget, we had to find neighborhoods where time had stopped - kind of stuck in the '50s. And no place had that better than Staten Island.

Well, let's put in this way, I grew up in West New York, New Jersey.

We made a deal that was acceptable to us. We got paid very handsomely for our final season.

The thing about For Better or Worse is the only thing that made me an okay director for that is that I have a sense of humor, and it was supposed to be funny.

The show is like an Edwardian play - emotional life gets stepped on for the sake of accepted manners, and that's terrific for actors to play in.

The greatest part of the job was... that was for nine years it was a pleasure to go to work.

I'm always more motivated by the pain of a funny character than by what makes him funny.

I would work with any one of them again in a heartbeat because it was joyous and incredibly easy.

I still don't know much about directing a movie.

But one sets of grandparents lived on Davidson Avenue in the Bronx and one lived in Manhattan and I had an aunt and uncle in Queens, so in my heart I was a New Yorker.

But I didn't know much about directing a movie.

I want to do all kinds of things. I want to do some comedy. I'd love to do a romantic comedy, and I'd love to do some period pieces with classical text. I'd love somebody to cast me as Macbeth, but for a film. I just want to be all over the place.

I absolutely love spending time with my family.

I found I wasn't asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something. I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn't know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen.

I find myself going to places where I really have no business, speaking to these people in a whole other field that I have no extensive knowledge of. But I do it very often because it scares me.

I don't really worry about the size of the part much any more. It's nice to have more time to work on the character, and to have big scenes to play. But if there's something playable there, and if it's interesting to do, then that's nice.

Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you.

And I think belief is one of those things that comes to people in their own way. And just because I believe in something doesn't mean I think that you should.

If I can't get the girl, at least give me more money.

Almost everybody that's well-known gets tagged with a nickname.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life.

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.

I'm greedy for that satisfaction of doing something hard and knowing that, even though I was afraid I couldn't do it, that somehow I can deliver.

As an artist, as an actor, as a writer, you have to use what's personal to you. You have to be personal about your work; otherwise, it doesn't ring true.

It's too bad I'm not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.

Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.

I'm an angry person, angrier than most people would imagine, I get flashes of anger. What works for me is working out when it's useful to use that anger.

Begin challenging your assumptions. Your assumptions are the windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile or the light won't come in.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.