I've always been more interested in the audience than I have in the plays. I like that idea of all those people sitting in the dark together. It's kind of fun.

I didn't think that a career in theater was very realistic so I thought the only thing I could make money doing and still be somewhat artistic was, god help me, advertising.

Its the difference between instinct and intuition.

I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.

I grew up in the Lower East Side of New York.

I'm misrepresented as a scary person. I'm not. It's all about my size and my eyebrows.

My publicist told me not to talk about politics but, yes, I think we have a president who stole the election.

As soon as you know what you're doing, you're doing it wrong.

I think that everything I've ever done at some point is part of someone else's legacy.

I'm not that interested in working with impervious people.

I don't think I've ever been a huge target for the press, and I value that to a degree, because there's a certain value for actors staying beneath the radar so they can play characters.

It's easier to revise lousy writing than to revise a blank sheet of paper.

He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest.

Man is happy only as he finds a work worth doing-and does it well.

Each sudden gust of light explains itself as flames, but neither they, nor even bombs redoubled on the hills tonight can quite include me in their fear.

Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.

The only way a show works is you find people who you think are qualified and talented and you give them a chance to do what they do.

I don't think I am narcissistic. I think I have low self-esteem.

I spoke in front of a huge gathering in Seattle, and someone got up and said, "I'm just so afraid." I said, "The only way not to be afraid is to join with other people who are also afraid."

Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.

How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude! But grant me still a friend in my retreat, whom I may whisper, solitude is sweet.