“It’s really clear to me that you can’t hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas.”

I found I wasn’t asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something.

I was always interested in figuring things out. I’d do experiments, like combining things I found around the house to see what would happen if I put them together.

Laugh at yourself, but don’t ever aim your doubt at yourself.

I found I wasn’t asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something.

Almost everybody that’s well-known gets tagged with a nickname.

The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed.

Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognize their names and faces but know nothing else about them? Why do we care what they think, what they wear, what they eat?

I don’t talk about my beliefs too much in public probably because I feel very strongly that it’s something personal – more than personal, it’s private.

The one hour live debate in the West Wing that we did was one of the most exciting times for me on stage or on camera, because anything could go wrong.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.

For a while in my teens, I was sure I had it. It was about getting to heaven. If heaven existed and lasted forever, then a mere lifetime spent scrupulously following orders was a small investment for an infinite payoff.

I’ve been nominated twice before as actor in a leading part. Now I’m nominated as actor in a supporting part.

I’ve been lucky enough to live through all the things that are supposed to give meaning to our lives, like parenting, grandparenting, art, celebrity.

Loneliness is everything it’s cracked up to be.

If I don’t win, I’ll just wait until I’m nominated for being in the theater during the show. Do they have one like that?

I was brought up as a Catholic, and I’m no longer a Catholic.

I just have an enthusiasm for life.

But I have bad taste with a deep fount of intellectuality.

The problem with having a sense of humor is often that people you use it on aren’t in a very good mood.

Football coaches don’t have real problems.

If Tiger Woods had played football, he would have been a quarterback.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

I believe that having a spiritual life is so important in everybody’s life.

The trouble is not that players have sex the night before a game. It’s that they stay out all night looking for it.