“Actors are physical, olympian storytellers and we should be able to create entire landscapes with nothing.”

My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young.

They didn’t really have a choice because I got jobs acting before anyone could really say anything.

I applied to American Repertory School up at Harvard at got in.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects.

Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing.

I love films for the fact that it is like working under a microscope. It is sort of like a laboratory.

I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.

I had been working early in my life in films – since I was 11.

In every character I play, I try to imbibe something. Every film is a learning process for me.

I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful.

There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold.

I want to present interesting stories that don’t qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

America makes up its own mind about what it wants to see.

I hear music as narrative.

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.

We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.

Anyone can have a good day, but you have to be able to perform on a bad day.

It’s the Tiger Woods effect. What he was able to accomplish at such a young age – he drew me to the game, and I can only speak for myself, but a lot of the players that are my age saw Tiger in his prime when we were all teenagers.

The thing I would like to be able to do is to make the music sound right no matter what it is. If somebody else wants to have a label for it, then that’s their business.

We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life.