“My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I’m 31-years-old, and I don’t want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It’s humiliating.”

I think we all like to see ourselves as good dads, but there’s also that fear, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be like my father,’ or, ‘I hope my kid doesn’t turn out like me.’ You know, I have those feelings too. So the key is optimism.

My mother went to Radcliffe, and rather than just trying to get rich, she wanted to be a teacher and taught for over 30 years in the public schools. She’s definitely got some war stories.

You have to pay people real money.

No actor forgets the times he couldn’t get a job. I think everyone doing this operates from that fear. You don’t want that momentum to stop when you get it.

If we try to define our own moral universe, there’s a price for that.

Anybody tells you that money is the root of all evil doesn’t have any.

But when I felt like I had something to prove? Then I got up early every morning and worked all day long. I didn’t know if I had any more talent than anyone else directing, but I knew I could work hard at it, and so I did.

You wasted $150,000 on an education you could have got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.

You get old, you slow down.

You don’t know what the pattern of flour and chicken is going to be, but you know you’re going to get some good fried chicken.

I find forgiveness to be really healthy.

A friend of my mom’s was a casting director so, really as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.

You have to be kind to people. Treat them decently. There’s no excuse for not.

It’s important for me to try my hand at philanthropy because I want to leave behind a record of someone who did more than just gobble up stuff for themselves. I realized that a life lived for yourself is not much of a life.

All I do, really, is go to work and try to be professional, be on time and be prepared.

Memories, all those little experiences make up the fabric of our lives and on balance, I wouldn’t want to erase any of them, tempting though it may be.

We were playing Chinese restaurants and basements and record stores and houses. We were crashing on floors and it was all new and exciting. It was like a vacation. It didn’t feel like work.

It’s actually safe to create a universe in your basement.

Seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.

A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.

I started recording in my sophomore year in high school. I recorded things on my cell phone in my basement.