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

Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window.

My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young.

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.

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

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.

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.

I mean, stand up you’re by yourself and it’s live and when you’re acting, unless you’re doing a monologue, you’re interacting with somebody else. Even if you’re doing a monologue you’re saying it to somebody and it’s not live so you can do it a few times.

I think personal growth has much to do with acting ability.