“When we were visiting New York City, I took my kids to the same playground where I went growing up. It was fun to feel that connection of having gone there as a kid and being there as a parent.”

Whatever talent I had, I’m sure it helped that my parents were in the business and that I grew up around actors, comedians and directors.

When you have kids you want to be able to go to movies and take the family too, and actually all enjoy it together. I don’t think there are that many great, live action family movies that everybody can enjoy.

Zoolander was more of my own sensibility.

The failure of The Cable Guy impacted my career. I had to start writing and acting again.

I don’t need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines !

It’s weird that people expect me to be funny. I find it a real burden when I’m expected to be humorous on talk shows.

When I was growing up, This is Spinal Tap [1984] was the ultimate comedy, and it was the kind of thing I wanted to do. But you get to a point with parody where you can’t go much further because ultimately it’s feeding off of somebody else’s creativity.

I have not been an easygoing guy. I think it’s called bipolar manic depression. I’ve got a rich history of that in my family.

Fashion is so over the top.

I was a bad student. I liked archaeology actually, I was interested in maybe becoming an archaeologist but I was such a bad student and had such bad grades that I wasn’t going to get into any really good college so I fell back on acting.

I’d love to travel more. I really look forward to traveling with my kids. I’m just waiting for them to want to travel with me.

It’s great to work with the people who make you laugh and who are funnier than I am.

I don’t think the public is dying to see me necessarily be funny all the time.

I actually started working on Madagascar before my daughter was born.

Sometimes I wondered whether I hadn’t let my career get confined to one direction, but lately I’ve decided to accept the fact that I have this opportunity to be successful doing comedies.

I don’t know what that weid fantasy is that makes people go, “Oh, you must have had a great childhood.”

I have a lot of feminist idols. My favorite thing about growing up in Arkansas – well, not favorite but something I’ve always felt grateful for – was that I really had to dig for what I could. There was no Internet. There wasn’t tons of feminist literature floating around.

Give someone who has faith in you a placebo and call it a hair growing pill, anti-nausea pill or whatever, and you will be amazed at how many respond to your therapy.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money.

I was painfully shy when I was younger but at some point you’ve gotta grow up. I think the genius in the man-boy thing is you tap into a woman’s motherly instincts.

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

While I was growing up, I believed I could do anything I could think of. So the challenge was always to keep thinking – to get to where I wanted to be and then to think of somewhere else to go.

Life is not about making money. It is about enhancing the quality of life for every single being so that they go from physical satisfaction to astral satisfaction to mental satisfaction to growing spiritual satisfaction, up and up and up, all the way. It’s all spiritual.