“For many years my acting came from a place of surmounting some enormous obstacle.”

Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music.

All I can say is if the part doesn’t delight me in some way, or I can’t feel any compassion for it, I just can’t do it.

Things are never going to turn out how you think they will.

A product is most easily sold when it has an identity. So they wrap you all up and put a label on you.

Even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did

And then that’s what you have to be. But what I’m looking for is the opportunity to explore what I can do, probing the limits, learning.

If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you’re doing something else or not.

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, “It’s better this way.” But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.

I don’t love the business. I never wanted to be a part of it. I don’t think any actor does.

” Education does not mean jamming information into somebody’s head. Rather, it’s that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.

We might just as well let the rest of it go, join the party, and dance our hearts out.

There’s a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me.

TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn’t use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not.

The ancient Vedas – the oldest Hindu philosophy – and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that’s true, there’s no such thing as a past or a future – it’s all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.

I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix.

I used to watch the world as if it was a performance and I would realize that certain things that people did moved me, and certain things didn’t move me, and I tried to analyze.

I’m just looking for things to steal [on working with great actors]. It’s like going back to acting school. When you’re around people that do it well and you get your head out of your ass, you can really learn something.

Acting’s always felt like a kind of creature that lays dormant and collects observations when I’m not working. And then when I’m actually doing it, it just rises up. But everything I do is more about curiosity and investigation than it is about performance.

The difference between the extras here and in France is the French extras read books. Actually, they hide the book and pretend that they’re acting. Here (in Hollywood), you can see everybody wants his break.

I wasn’t disciplined at all. As good of an athlete as I was, I was not disciplined. Had I had the drive that I have in comedy, and acting, and writing, that’s why I knew it just wasn’t right for me.

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

The whole thing about acting, the draw for me, is the opportunity to do things you don’t get to do in real life.

What matters in Politics is what men actually do – sincerity is no excuse for acting unpolitically, and insincerity may be channelled by politics into good results.

I was a bad student. I liked archaeology actually, I was interested in maybe becoming an archaeologist but I was such a bad student and had such bad grades that I wasn’t going to get into any really good college so I fell back on acting.