“The vampire craze is kind of fascinating. We’re interested in the idea of immorality and I think we’re drawn to people or creatures who can give in to those base impulses and just be bad and not feel bad about it.”

I went to Julliard and we did a lot of mask work there, and I remember thinking in class, ‘When am I ever going to use this?

Maybe I’m naive, but I subscribe to the idea that nobody is actually making strategic decisions about their career. Trying to do that would be like playing three-card monte on Canal Street.

I’d consider myself a flailing comedy writer.

I only play projects with weird interpretations of presidents.

You learn history in school, and you have a reverential feeling toward it. But by being irreverent, it feels current.

I thought I was going to be a ballet dancer for awhile there. I had a good teacher at Interlochen, this arts’ academy in Michigan, who taught me the importance of storytelling, and I really responded to that. It seemed like a long shot, but I always play the long odds.

Every job is an opportunity to be a better person.

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.

You never can take for granted that you have a job.

You never know when you’ll have a bad idea for a worse joke.

People are still people, and they make their decisions based on their life experiences and their beliefs. You really can’t divorce the two. It’s important to fight against stereotypes and oversimplifications in very complex people.

Even the greatest actors have had dry spells where they’ve wondered if they were going to work again.

You think of George Washington, this man who was larger than life, and in some ways he was. But at the same time, he’s just a person.

Don’t trust somebody that don’t have a troubled period.

The place I feel most at home is when I have health insurance. I really don’t care how I get it, whether it’s on film, or television or waiting tables, you know?

You know, 1% of us is in the armed forces, protecting the other 99, and they’re all volunteers.

A good feeling for me is when you train, and then you put on fresh clothes. New clothes after a training session – you have this rush of endorphins from exercise that everybody gets, and then you get that nice feeling of fresh clothes. It’s a double whammy.

I never fail to feel let down when I see myself on the screen.

We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.

You feel vulnerable when you hear things that are not being said.

The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can’t be spoken in words alone.

We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they’re not like him.

So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.