“For many years my acting came from a place of surmounting some enormous obstacle.”

I’ve always considered myself an actor, but I wasn’t making a living as an actor.

Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music.

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.

Things are never going to turn out how you think they will.

A product is most easily sold when it has an identity. So they wrap you all up and put a label on you.

Even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did

And then that’s what you have to be. But what I’m looking for is the opportunity to explore what I can do, probing the limits, learning.

If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you’re doing something else or not.

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, “It’s better this way.” But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.

I don’t love the business. I never wanted to be a part of it. I don’t think any actor does.

” Education does not mean jamming information into somebody’s head. Rather, it’s that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.

We might just as well let the rest of it go, join the party, and dance our hearts out.

There’s a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me.

TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn’t use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not.

The ancient Vedas – the oldest Hindu philosophy – and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that’s true, there’s no such thing as a past or a future – it’s all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.

I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix.

Life is like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

I suddenly think the job of acting is a difficult one. It’s not as flip, irrelevant, and shallow a calling as I thought it was in the Eighties.

When a role for a young guy is being offered to me, I think of River Phoenix. It feels like a loss.

The good thing about acting is that it always keeps you on your toes. It’s not like any other job where you can go in and do the same thing as yesterday.

We supposed to be grown, but yet you still acting childish.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it.

Acting is different from stand-up. It gives you this ability to enter into another character, to create another person.