I've played villains on stage - you know, the Iagos and so on - but I think of myself as a funny person. I mostly did comedies before I did TV work.

I think people respond to villains because people in general are more villainous than heroic.

I've been blessed by doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever.

My mother always told me growing up I had a punchable face. Little did I know she was predicting my television career.

To a large extent, people's interest in the character is the mystery of the character.

Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they'd even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together.

In part because they had no choice, right? If you were a slave, you did what the master said. And they said to worship: "You're going to worship with us."

I really do think that every time you play a role well, you are in danger of being identified with that role until the next big thing comes along.

Life will be simpler when I don't spend two-thirds of the year in the middle of the Pacific.

I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.

As you may know, previously as Attorney General and now as Governor, I have supported legislation to close the gun show loophole in North Carolina.

Some are born great some achieve greatness and some hire public relations officers.

Leave the atom alone.

I used to be very shy. When I first started, I had to go to a casting, and I had to go in a bikini. I thought I was too skinny. But I went in and got the job! And that's how I started.

I love Kathy Griffin, I think she's brilliant, but for me, there is a line when I go OK, that's too much.

Insanity is the insistence on meaning.

I have not come to know atheism as a result of logical reasoning and still less as an event in my life: in me it is a matter of instinct.

Speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes! he only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases!

Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.

I think in the darkest moments, we need a break.

When I started at the Globe 40 years ago, there were seven newspapers in Boston and now there are only two. There were only three or four television stations in Boston and now there are a dozen.