I would rather die than do a play – 10 years in solitary instead.

What I look for these days is that I don’t have long speeches, the characters gets to sit down a lot, I don’t have to learn any foreign languages, and it doesn’t shoot in Minneapolis...

I used to have a lot of philosophies of acting; they all fell apart over the years.

You hit a certain age, and you haven’t died yet, and you become an elder statesman. I think I get a lot of applause because I’m not keeling over.

I gotta make a living. I make no bones about that. Most actors do. But within that context, I’ve never not tried to make something as fresh and alive as I possibly could make it.

I don’t live in L.A. on purpose because I don’t wanna be immersed in that. I have to have a real life, with real people, in order to inform what I’m doing; otherwise, it just...

I wrote my epitaph: He started out a particle and ended up a wave.

But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out...

Unless you’re doing Shakespeare or Chekhov… the written word is not sacrosanct.

You have to think of your career the way you look at the ocean, deciding which wave you’re gonna take and which waves you’re not gonna take. Some of the waves are going to be...

A director without a vision is a catastrophe.

I used to watch the world as if it was a performance and I would realize that certain things that people did moved me, and certain things didn’t move me, and I tried to analyze,...

I had a hard time treating my field as if it’s horse racing, putting actors in competition against each other. I see how the industry and the studios feel it’s important, but I don’t really...

I’ve always been an improviser. I was one before I knew even what the word was… And acting, that I’ve been doing since I was 5.

I can’t even pretend to play golf.

I’m an actor. My life as an actor depends on who sends me what. I’m just taking the best stuff that I can find that’s sent my way, regardless of how big or little the...

I did a couple of movies in Brazil, and the actors were incredibly congenial and hung out together a lot. Even the biggest stars would do radio commercials – they’re not put on a pedestal...

All I can say is if the part doesn’t delight me in some way, or I can’t feel any compassion for it, I just can’t do it.

I’d have to say that my favorite kind of film is serious comedy. Comedy with serious underpinning. ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ is like that. That’s my fave genre, if I had to pick one.

I don’t sense that I am someone’s hero, though I’m happy when people like my work. I’ve learned how to be gracious about it, but I try to let it go by. I’ve seen how,...

It’s not that there is a terrible morality in Hollywood. I think there isn’t any. There isn’t any, by and large.

I don’t know what I’m proudest of. The fact that my kids still talk to me.

My favorite thing about making movies is that it’s the only area of human life that I’ve ever discovered where I can walk away from somebody in the middle of a conversation with somebody and...