“I still get very scared when I step in front of a live audience.”

It’s hard to soar with the eagles when you’re surrounded by turkeys.

I had my moments of being humiliated, and then I had moments of doing something humiliating. I’m glad I lived out both roles.

I definitely connected to the fact that life gets out of control and you end up doing things and wishing you were doing other things instead.

In one day, I have times where I’m feeling great, I feel like I love my life, and then 2:30 rolls around and I’m the angriest man alive. My wife sees it.

You’ve just got to give yourself time – that’s good advice I think. Give yourself time to figure out what you’re good at and what you’re not good at.

When the kids are laughing in the audience, I tear up, I’m so happy I did a nice thing.

I don’t like being out in public too much. I don’t like going to bars. I don’t like doing celebrity stuff.

With the amount of money I have, it’s difficult raising children the way I was raised.

I think when I bought a house, that’s when I thought I felt like that’s a grown up thing to do.

I enjoy doing all different types of movies even though I am the most comfortable with comedy.

I wasn’t a kid growing up thinking, ‘One day I’ll get an Oscar and make a speech.’ That wasn’t on my mind.

I do feel good doing them [family-friendly movies], but it’s not going to be my way of life. I’m a comedian.

Now that I’m a parent, I understand why my father was in a bad mood a lot.

I do want children. I study dads more. I watch what they go through. I admire my father more than I ever did and my brother and my sister.

I don’t laugh at me. I used to. I used to get the giggles when I’d see myself. But now, I see myself onscreen, and I sure don’t laugh.

I wanted to make sure that I did one movie in my career that mothers hug me for.

I always want to win because I never want to sit out on the sidelines outside.

It’s kind of a hybrid, half movie, half play, presented in a proscenium fashion – the camera’s on one side of the line, the set on the other, the audience sitting behind the cameras.

Sometimes when I perform, and it’s obvious the audience is just there to party, or if I feel a wall between me and the audience, I get existential about it.

I think the pressure gets to me when I play shows and there’s more people in the audience than I’m used to.

That really is my trademark. Day to day, week in, week out. If something happens and the crowd roars, I shut up.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?’

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

If for the sake of a crowded audience you do wish to hold a lecture, your ambition is no laudable one, and at least avoid all citations from the poets, for to quote them argues feeble industry.