“I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.”

How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

I know I’m pretty, but I ain’t as pretty as a couple of titties.

Each role you play, they set a bar of challenges that you meet. And in the past, I’ve played characters that emotionally expressed themselves a bit more in a physical way. It was a joy, actually.

I want my weekends off and I want to put my kids to bed. Those are good reasons to want to be in ‘Batman 2’.

On set I keep myself to myself; I’d rather the director speak up. I’m not gonna direct a younger actor. I think the power of example works best, actually.

The script is your map of the world, isn’t it? And if someone knows that if it’s well-written, you get all of the beats, it will tell you everything you need to know.

I’m rarely asked to play the smartest man in the room.

You always hope that the cloak of inspiration will fall, and you’ll be O.K.

I went and lived in Chicago for a year , and I studied at the police academy.

As an actor, you people-watch, you observe. And the more famous you become, the sad thing is you lose the ability to do that. Instead of people-watching, you become the focus of attention.

Reality TV to me is the museum of social decay.

I drank for about 25 years getting over the loss of my father, and I took the anger out on myself. I did a good job at beating myself up sometimes.

Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.

I was brought up by my mother and my two sisters, although they’re older than me and fled the nest very young, so I was technically raised as an only child, but I was very much loved.

Political correctness has become a straightjacket.

People who know me , they know I have a sense of humor, I’m a bit of a joker, a bit of a clown really, and I would love someone to exploit that side of me and send me a romantic comedy.

Plato’s dialogues bear at least some similarities to the classical plays.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Anybody can be a rapper, but not anybody can be a classical artist.

The Beatles are the classical music of rock n’ roll. And rock n’ roll is far more widespread than classical will ever be.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.

Classical music’s ability to translate emotional themes is fantastic.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had