“Playing a character is an illusion, and I feel that when you know too much about a person, possibly part of that illusion is disrupted.”

If something is working, don’t fix it. Keep going. Go with the glow.

Or try out what I learned and see how it worked with an audience, because where are you gonna get an audience?

I’m always on a red carpet . . . the other day I thought, this ain’t bad. You can meet people on it.

I would say I am more concerned with the plays I’m going to do than the movies.

I don’t care if it’s a walk in the park, a look out the window, a good bubble bath – whatever. Even a meal you like, or a friend you want to call. That helps us solve all this stuff in our head.

Larry Grobel has the illness of all writers, he can’t help himself.

I just wondered how it would feel, how people would treat her, but she’s adjusted so marvelously.

I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text, the script and become him. It’s almost like a painter having a model to become.

A good warm bath can be one for you, or a whatever.

I thought it was time to show some of it, to show some of my feelings about things and what I preferred at the time. I prefer them still but not to the extent I did at the time.

When I was a younger actor, I would try to keep it serious all day. But I have found, later on, that the lighter I am about things when I’m going to do a big scene that’s dramatic and takes a lot out of you, the better off I am when I come to it.

At this point in my career, I don’t have to deal with audition rejections. So I get my rejection from other things.

Great directors can understand the staging in such a way that can make a scene come alive. Others have a certain way of pacing the scene.

Vanity is my favourite sin.

I was playing a part of someone dealing dope on a street corner – and there was a guy actually dealing heroin right there. I looked at him, he looked at me, and I got real confused.

I’ve had very deep relationships that lasted for long periods of time with people.

It hurts! It throbs with pain, the like of which I never felt the half! Mortal flesh would scream again . . . yet demon spirit bids to laugh

I feel like everyone who goes to The University of Texas is blessed and lucky to be there because they’re getting a chance to be as good as they can be.

Nowadays people don’t know how to handle it if all the ends aren’t tied up and they’re not told what to think in films. And if they’re challenged, they think it’s something wrong with the film.

When I talk to audiences about the size and age of the cosmos, people often say, “It makes me feel so insignificant.” I answer, “The bigger and more impersonal the universe is, the more meaningful you are, because this vast.

My feeling about work is it’s much more about the experience of doing it than the end product. Sometimes things that are really great and make lots of money are miserable to make, and vice versa.

It is not hard to feel like an outsider. I think we have all felt like that at one time or another.

I want to feel sympathetic and close to others, not opposed to them.

The overwhelming triumph of the international multimedia conglomerate has resulted in less diversity within the field and has made it much harder for newer writers not only to break in, but to make any kind of a living while doing so.