“And when I told my sons I might be in City of Ember, they said, ‘Oh! You’re gonna be the mayor?’ And I hadn’t even read the script yet.”

When everything goes well. When sails rip, engines freeze up and you find there are organisms growing inside the diesel, it’s terrible and amazing stuff.

It’s hard to be an artist. It’s hard to be anything. It’s hard to be.

Movie acting suits me because I only need to be good for ninety seconds at a time.

That’s sort of why I got into acting. I realized the more fun I had, the better I did it. And I thought, that’s a job I could be proud of. It’s changed my life learning that, and it’s made me better at what I do.

Somewhere there’s a score being kept, so you have an obligation to live life as well as you can, be as engaged as you can.

But I can only take so much TV, because there is so much advice. I find people will preach about virtually anything – your diet, how to live your life, how to improve your golf. The lot. I have always had a thing against the Mister Know-It-Alls.

I really don’t know what’s going to come out of my mouth.

You’ll never be good if you don’t know that you are.

You know…they say an elephant never forgets. What they don’t tell you is, you never forget an elephant.

Groundhog Day’ was one of the greatest scripts ever written. It didn’t even get nominated for an Academy Award.

There’s only a couple times when fame is ever helpful. Sometimes you can get into a restaurant where the kitchen is just closing.

I don’t answer fan mail. I don’t have time for that. It’s like hundreds of thousands of people who think they’re going to become millionaires getting autographs from movie actors. I don’t have time for those idiots. I’ve got stuff to do.

The atheists traditionally hold their conventions from Good Friday to Easter Sunday during the hours Christ spent in the grave.

I’d sort of gone through some sort of spiritual change in the late 70s where I sort of saw there was some other life to live. It changed the way that I worked just having a different presence and a different tension.

I think midlife crisis is just a point where people’s careers have reached some plateau and they have to reflect on their personal relationships.

When the phone started ringing too many times, I had to take it back to what I can handle. I take my chances on a job or a person as opposed to a situation. I don’t like to have a situation placed over my head.