“A friend of my mom’s was a casting director so, really as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.”

Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms.

I just feel like sometimes I’m a force to be dealt with. My talents are sometimes overused and also sometimes underused. It’s not easy being me.

Online gambling is very seductive and very illusory. It can seem like a really good idea. It can seem like what people told you to work hard and get ahead, but when someone shows you something and it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

No matter how much you change, you still got to pay the price for the things you’ve done.

I dyed my hair for photo tests… I kept it because when am I ever going to be blond again?

I grew up in a home environment where I wasn’t getting esteem for anything I did.

No matter what you’re doing, if you’re trying to make a movie, you need to be working with people that are really good and who make you better.

I have a good instinct for what’s real and what’s not. I don’t have to second-guess myself.

The trap for an actor is that you become too successful at what you’re trying to do, and you can find yourself stuck there.

I hate the whole reluctant sex-symbol thing. It’s such bull. You see these dudes greased up, in their underwear, talking about how they don’t want to be a sex symbol.

I’m trying to make people feel welcome and feel valued.

I try new things and give myself permission to fail and experiment because only that way can you get really successful.

I really think that everybody would like to be an actor. Why wouldn’t they? It’s great work if you can get it. The one thing that prevents most people from saying, ‘I’m just gonna go to Hollywood!’ is that it seems unrealistic.

A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you a reason he can’t. Either way a sale is made, the only question is: Who is gonna close?

I feel things more deeply anything to do with kids. It just makes a big difference in my life Having a child is like taking the deepest core vulnerable aspect of myself, reaching in and taking it outside of my body.

I don’t go back and look at the monitor between every take; I wait until I feel like we finally got it right: “Let me stop and look at that last one on the monitor.”

I began stealing a lot of ideas from other directors I had worked with.

And I don’t think Director Comey ever adequately explained why he treated the Clinton investigation one way and the Trump investigation another.

It was an echo of Director Comey’s testimony that Trump showed no curiosity, no interest, no concern over the Russia hack.

By his own admission, was discussing the future of Director Comey in that job, and the president brings up whether he is under investigation, highly unethical, at a minimum, unethical.

The most important thing to me is that the president Donald Trump fired the FBI director James Comey all because of the Russia investigation.

I don’t like the sort of hierarchical, totalitarian type of room a lot of directors can find themselves in.

I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn’t matter.

The play is called Stalking The Bogeyman. It was a story on This American Life, and my former roommate is the artistic director of the New York Repertory Theater.