“I had been working early in my life in films – since I was 11.”

They didn’t really have a choice because I got jobs acting before anyone could really say anything.

I applied to American Repertory School up at Harvard at got in.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects.

Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing.

I love films for the fact that it is like working under a microscope. It is sort of like a laboratory.

I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.

In every character I play, I try to imbibe something. Every film is a learning process for me.

I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful.

There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold.

I want to present interesting stories that don’t qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

America makes up its own mind about what it wants to see.

I hear music as narrative.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

It paid my way through college and helped my family out.

You see Boris Becker, Mats Wilander, Nadal, Pete Sampras – they were all great when they were young. As a coach, you can see that type of talent at an early age.

Walk in awe, wonder, and humility. Walk at all times of day. In the early morning when the world is just waking up. Late at night under the stars. Along a busy city street at noontime.

Early is on time and on time is late.

Walk with a sense of being a part of a vast universe. Consider the thousands of miles of earth beneath your feet; think of the limitless expanse of space above your head.

Getting up early and setting myself daily targets, even outside of acting, keeps me active and motivated in general and thus happier, which I hope translates into my personality and my work.

How can I regain even for a minute the feeling of ample leisure I had during my early, my creative years? Then I seldom felt fussed, or hurried.

Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.

I’m starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There’s a darkness inside of me that I’m only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it’s starting to scare me.