“That’s what I always enjoyed about acting, the real adrenalin rush. My heart – still before I go on stage – crashing out of my chest. That’s thrilling to me.”

One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.

When somebody on a professional scale says “you did it wrong,” it has a pretty intense impact. If you don’t have some kind of opposing force to say, “that’s all right, that’s their opinion,” or, “I may have screwed that one up but I’ll do better the next time,” then you’re screwed.

If I had done ‘Titanic,’ it would have made, probably, $200,000 – worldwide. So I think my life would have been very, very similar.

You’re giving the audience in real time something authentic from yourself. As an actor, my bullshit meter was going off like crazy at my first attempts to find my own rock star.

From here on out, I am only interested in what is real. Real people, real feelings, that’s it. That’s all I’m interested in.

I feel the film companies should pay for proper advertising to see that the movie will sell, instead of putting it on our backs.

I don’t want to expose the intricacies of my work so people can understand how I did it.

Interest in certain themes doesn’t mandate a personal stake or personal experience of those themes. I’ve killed people in plays, but no one asks me what it’s like to kill people.

A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.

I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.

My parents were really encouraging. But I had to teach them the proper way you respond to an actor after seeing a play – regardless of whether you like their performance you tell them how great they are because they have to go on again the next night.

It came up after doing St. Jimmy on Broadway for American Idiot. I loved acting, and so I just kept my options open.

In writing the autobiography, I can really chuckle when I look at the songs. I was acting out the part. I saw myself as a victim.

One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.

In effect the people were present through their representatives, and were themselves, step by step and point by point, acting in the conduct of public affairs. No longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government.

Not that they were that anxious to see Ronnie as President; they were afraid if he didn’t get elected, he’d go back to acting.

I played St. Jimmy on Broadway I sort of caught the acting bug. But I didn’t want to go full-bore into it because I have a lot to learn.

I tried acting and all of the arts, I even put out a record album, but what I like the most is business.

I really like acting but, just now, the more I read a script I find myself thinking I’d like to direct rather than act.