“You learn history in school, and you have a reverential feeling toward it. But by being irreverent, it feels current.”

I went to Julliard and we did a lot of mask work there, and I remember thinking in class, ‘When am I ever going to use this?

Maybe I’m naive, but I subscribe to the idea that nobody is actually making strategic decisions about their career. Trying to do that would be like playing three-card monte on Canal Street.

I’d consider myself a flailing comedy writer.

I only play projects with weird interpretations of presidents.

I thought I was going to be a ballet dancer for awhile there. I had a good teacher at Interlochen, this arts’ academy in Michigan, who taught me the importance of storytelling, and I really responded to that. It seemed like a long shot, but I always play the long odds.

Every job is an opportunity to be a better person.

I’m just looking for things to steal [on working with great actors]. It’s like going back to acting school. When you’re around people that do it well and you get your head out of your ass, you can really learn something.

You never can take for granted that you have a job.

You never know when you’ll have a bad idea for a worse joke.

The vampire craze is kind of fascinating. We’re interested in the idea of immorality and I think we’re drawn to people or creatures who can give in to those base impulses and just be bad and not feel bad about it.

People are still people, and they make their decisions based on their life experiences and their beliefs. You really can’t divorce the two. It’s important to fight against stereotypes and oversimplifications in very complex people.

Even the greatest actors have had dry spells where they’ve wondered if they were going to work again.

You think of George Washington, this man who was larger than life, and in some ways he was. But at the same time, he’s just a person.

Don’t trust somebody that don’t have a troubled period.

The place I feel most at home is when I have health insurance. I really don’t care how I get it, whether it’s on film, or television or waiting tables, you know?

You know, 1% of us is in the armed forces, protecting the other 99, and they’re all volunteers.

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

I kinda see my current position like this: Here’s your five minutes in the toy store, so you gotta do all the good movies you can before ‘Chuck Woolery’ rings the bell.

Jeff Sessions, the person who`s likely to become our next attorney general, is striking a very different tone from our current attorney general, Loretta Lynch, who announced a consent decree with the city of Baltimore.

I am somehow inclined to move against this current, in search of what it might mean to be connected not just spiritually, but also vertically.

The possibility of a war under the current circumstances is not far-fetched and there is some evidence for that.

I always thought that life was about standing your ground, no matter how strong the current was. But going with the flow isn’t so bad after all. As long as it takes you forward.

And what does the beach knows of depths, the cold, the currents just there, where-do you see it? – Where the water turns a deeper blue.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.