“I want to be Lon Chaney. I want to be Karloff. I want to help people escape the mundane world. I want to make their skins crawl. And I want them to love it every bit as much as I do.”

Lincoln is me. He is America. He is what makes us a great nation and a dangerous nation, all wrapped up in one man.

The live audience is a blind date. The camera is a hungry lover. One wants to be wined and dined and seduced and then decide where the evening will go.

Ask questions. Listen. Be quiet. Be willing to make a fool of yourself. Be willing to be completely exposed and to give all you’ve got and to be rejected for your troubles. But expect magic to happen. It just might. And don’t worry about winning the audition, just win the room.

Lincoln could be on the moon. He’s still Lincoln.

The other knows how it wants to be touched, wants it now and can damn well tell if you are lying about it. Both are fickle. Both feel good. Depends on your mood.

I am pre-disposed to try and show the conflict; the regret; the less-than-perfect choices that any human faces. That’s what I like and it seems to be what the camera likes to see me do.

All you have to do to be a camera actor is tell the truth.

The fact that Abraham Lincoln ever, ever became President is either a freak accident of history… or destiny; God’s providence to America.

Abraham Lincoln is resolute, honest, has the best interest of the nation at heart, and he’s as ugly as homemade Sunday sin, so he is modest, too. I’d vote for that in an undead heartbeat.

Take every job. Learn everybody’s name. Show up early. Know who you are and know who you’re not. Stop dreaming and start trying.

Those who have never worked nude outdoors just can’t imagine how much better a breeze feels on their skin than an item of sweaty clothing.

After all, film is so porous, and to my mind, so oddly occult, that I think that film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin.

At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one’s own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person’s skin.

My great grandma always told me to drink a lot of milk because it’s good for the skin.

First developed as a weapon by the U.S. Army, VX is an oily, odorless and tasteless liquid that kills on contact with the skin or when inhaled in aerosol form.

[She] was made up of skin and bones and hate and crazy, and hate and crazy don’t weigh anything.

You have to create love and affection for your body, for what it can do for you. Love must be incarnated in the smallest pore of the skin, the smallest cell of the body to make them intelligent so they can collaborate with all the other ones, in the big republic of the body. This love must radiate from you to others.

The evocative power of the drum can be compared to the Trinity. The drum’s frame comes from the trunk of a tree, and that tree has a spirit. It is not dead wood. There is also spirit in the animal skin. If there wasn’t, it would not produce sound. Those, plus the spirit of the person playing become an irresistible force.