“Really top-notch directors, I’ve often worked with them just to see how they work.”

I have thought about punching people out. Sometimes, I’ve thought, ‘Why don’t I just act on that impulse?’ But then, I’ve never hit anybody in anger. Hey! I’ve never hit anybody for fun.

I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don’t exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time.

I had never really wanted to be famous. Everyone is supposed to want to be rich and famous, but as a boy I never knew what rich was, and the first view I had of famous made me leery.

When people are laughing, they’re generally not killing one another.

And I want to warn everyone in the press and all the voters out there: if you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians, you are just begging to be lied to.

You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.

It makes it fun. When an actor plays a character, you want what that character wants. Otherwise it doesn’t look authentic. So I really want to defeat Jimmy – I mean Jimmy as the character.

People who laugh together generally don’t kill each other.

I’ve played a murderer, so certainly I think I can play a Republican.

I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn’t really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you’re trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.

Someone wrote a Wikipedia entry about me, identifying me as an atheist because I’d said in a book I wrote that I wasn’t a believer.

One day, though, I realized I was no longer a believer, and realizing that, I couldn’t go back.

Testosterone Poisoning: … Until now it has been thought that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can’t bring back anything to life.

A really great actor, in a lucky performance, can transform himself or herself. I’ve seen actors do that.

I still don’t like the word agnostic. It’s too fancy. I’m simply not a believer. But, as simple as this notion is, it confuses some people.

Obviously there was Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe, but Howard was on the brink of becoming a famous director – it didn’t happen because he died.

I would love to get great performances from actors as a director, because that’s what I’m always looking for, a director that’s going to help me go places I’ve never been before.

Directors, producers can make you look good or make you look bad.

My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while framing a better shot.

You realize as a director that when you are cutting a film, you want to have alternatives. You need color and choices. You don’t want four takes that are identical.

In the normal life of an actor or director, running around, there’s not much time to go to church. But there’s other ways to be spiritual, too.

How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

On set I keep myself to myself; I’d rather the director speak up. I’m not gonna direct a younger actor. I think the power of example works best, actually.