The environmental movement, like all political processes, reacts best to disasters. But these are very slow, very gradual disasters in the making.

My reward in life for growing up a little bit was that Mary Steenburgen came into my life, and we have been together for 19 years.

My lessons didn’t come at my father’s knee. Like all good lessons, they were learned from example.

My father went to work every day, and it’s my job to go to work, too. Some days will be good, some won’t be so good, but I have to go to work.

The industrial way we fish for seafood is harming the marine habitats that all ocean life depends upon. Indiscriminate commercial fishing practices that include miles of driftnets, long lines with thousands of lethal hooks and bottom trawls are ruining ocean ecosystems by killing non-seafood species, including sea turtles and marine mammals.

I don’t think I’m as educated as Whoopi, so I’m lifting myself to her level. But you know, our view of the world, our view of what we can do, our sense of what it means to be here, are similar.

I am so grateful that I accepted the offer to do ‘CSI,’ but it was like being shot out of a cannon, and it was so different from anything that I have ever done.

When you have brothers, you learn to be fiercely competitive with someone you love so they won’t kill you and you won’t kill them.

Usually if you’re the center of a show, part of your job is to host its energy.

I’m an actor, so I am always scared. You never know if you are on vacation or that you have been retired and they just didn’t tell you.

A friend is someone who will allow me to be a really bad friend and not hold it against me.

California is responsible for selling, trading and distributing large amounts of shark fins that come from all over the world.

Centuries-old habitats such as coral gardens are destroyed in an instant by bottom trawls, pulverized by weighted nets into barren plains. And global carbon dioxide emissions from human activity affect the ocean, changing the pH balance of the waters in a phenomenon known as ocean acidification.

We have a project with Unocal here in Los Angeles, where we as an environmental organization, the oil company, and the state all get together to promote the recycling of used motor oil.

We are so arrogant, we forget that we are not the reason for evolution, we are not the point of evolution. We are part of evolution. Unfortunately, we believe that we’ve been created to dominate the planet, to dominate nature. Ain’t true.

I think the struggle, whenever you make a film or television movie based on a real person’s life, is finding a dramatic arc that will hold an audience’s attention.

I got my first television at Stanford when I was 20, and I used to watch ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’. He played my father on ‘Becker,’ and he’s still one of my heroes. Along with John Cleese, he’s my favourite physical comedian.

Everything I am, everything I’ve been allowed to do, career-wise, has come out of the opportunity I had with ‘Cheers’. I think it’s one of the funniest shows ever. They are some of my best friends.

My temperament is not the adventuresome sort that enjoys starting new projects every six months. I love ensemble, nine-to-five stability. There’s a family dynamic in making a television show that you don’t get on a movie, where you’re a hired gun for a few months.

I tell you, the difference for me is between being victimized, terrorized, numbed by reading about different disasters, or reducing the anxiety by getting up and doing something about it, at whatever level.

To grow up knowing you’re loved is astounding. It’s a huge gift to a child.

You should always carry string, according to my archaeologist father, because then you could at least make a trap to catch animals to survive. According to my grandmother, it was clean underwear.

One of the hardest things for me to do is watch myself. The first time I see it, I am obsessed with my left ear or my right ear or some other physical attribute, or the fact that I’m 60 or whatever shallow ego thought is running through my head. I’m just destroyed that I’m...

I’m almost tempted, when I’m playing a real person, not to meet them. Afterwards, maybe. But, the job is the same. You still have to show up on screen and be alive and real and all that stuff.

I was at our beautiful home in Martha’s Vineyard, near Boston, sitting on the porch looking at the ocean when I got a phone called and was asked, ‘Would I like to do ‘CSI’?’ A week later, I’m at a coroner’s office in Las Vegas, participating in a quadruple autopsy.

To do something funny, you have to have experienced it in real life and digested it in a way that amuses you.

Sharks are in real trouble, and they need all the help they can get.

My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life.

I eat less, stretch, and work out.

You have to be an optimist, right? You have to be critical, then you have to be an optimist. Or else you’re really stupid.

My day goes from one embarrassing moment to the next.

I don’t think it’s a matter of, do you win the game or not, it’s how gracefully do you play it.

To be successful, you have to be willing to be successful. You have to believe in the law of attraction – that you create your own life.

When people are in the midst of really heavy stuff and still have a sense of humor, I admire that.

If you take one rivet out of an airplane, it will be all right, it’ll keep flying. You take another rivet out of the airplane and it still flies. So what the heck, let’s take more rivets out of the airplane, and sooner or later, the airplane drops from the sky.

Years ago, we all talked about recycling and not dumping things down your drain and all of that, but talking doesn’t help much. Basically, it’s going to have to be legislation because the impact is so huge and diversified.

I used to have a little silent prayer: ‘Dear God, let my ability to get work be the same as my celebrity.’ That would be a hard burden: to be a household name and not be able to get work.

I moved into this neighborhood, and I was walking on this beach with my kids, and we came across a sign that said, ‘Water’s polluted, no swimming.’ And I didn’t have any answers.

We are all in this together. We will all make it or none of us will make it. If everyone cleans up their act except one big ole country, it isn’t going to work.

I think it’s the actor’s job – when you think of being typecast or getting out of the shadow of whatever you’ve had success in – it’s up to you as an actor. The industry will always want to hire you for what you were successful in last and what made money. But you can...

I try not to see Woody Harrelson because he has become this big movie star, and it grates, so I try and stay away from him.

Humor can bring people under the tent. And a good joke can deflect some of the intensity surrounding a serious subject.

How much do you engage yourself in what’s truly real and important in life? That’s the individual question.

My joints hurt. I’m slower. But I remember what it was like to run and play with the boys. I want to be one of the boys.

My most annoying habit is complaining about my aches and pains. It’s the new ones that I haven’t identified yet that make me nervous. According to my wife, I complain way too much. I may be a borderline hypochondriac, or you could say I am fascinated by the body – at least by mine.

You have to work with the auto industry, the oil companies, you have to work to develop renewable fuel, whether it’s solar or different kinds of fuel or whatever.

We need to start looking at having a way of managing the whole ecosystem, because you can’t pick away at it piece by piece, you have to truly start being coordinated and managing our resources as a system. We haven’t gotten to that point yet.

The pressure isn’t on my brain, but on my mouth. I realized Sam Malone said very little, he spoke in little sentences. Which is much more comfortable for me for some reason.

I’m basically a know-it-all, and I’m writing a book about it. I want it to be called ‘Danson on Water’ and have me on the cover in this Christlike pose, standing on the water.

I was three. My father in jest said that he’d tell the doctor to give me a shot if I didn’t behave. Good heavens, I have a mental picture of the living room and the doctor approaching the door. I was terrified.