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

I knew I was happy when I was dancing.

Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window.

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.

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.

With everything that is complex, we learn. If you don’t learn, then it’s an utter and abject failure. If you do learn, and you’re able to apply that to the next situation, then you take away a measure of success.

Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all… My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.

When it applies to the Olympics and making a decision, I have to claim Australia as my country.

He stares at me, and I don’t look away. He isn’t a dog, but the same rules apply. Looking away is submissive.

Once war is forced upon us, there is no alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory-not prolonged indecision.

Ego is constantly attempting to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit.

To get a roaster clean, send something like baked apples in it to a neighbor. Neighbors always return pans spotless, and you won’t have to use a blow torch on it like you usually do.