My favorite parts of work as an actor and a director are those unplanned mistakes that do happen, because it's like catching lightning in a bottle. It's the best part of what we do.
It's always like you write a poem when you can't really say what you're trying to say.
It's hard to find scripts that know what they are from page one to page 115.
I don't want to know what happens in any movie that I go to see.
Garry Shandling is someone I've publicly gone gay for, for jokes. Oh and anyone in the Twilight movies. I don't know any of their names, but all of them. The wolves, the vampires? They're all fantastic.
Part of being an actor is letting things come about organically as opposed to forcing them.
When I grew up, I was in Manhattan the whole time. But my kids have been all over the world.
When I started getting notoriety it was cheesy to appear in a commercial.
I was about 26 or 27 and it was imperative that I make a living right away and it's hard to make a living on stage, so I started in television and film.
I would say recently I've gotten back to perusing [Samuel] Beckett's novels. Listening to the way Donald Trump speaks without saying anything has made me think about language.
Becoming an actor made me way more interested in plot.
Women's fashion is a subtle form of bondage. It's men's way of binding them. We put them in these tight, high-heeled shoes, we make them wear these tight clothes and we say they look sexy. But they're actually tied up.
There are people who are really great musicians. I've met a lot of them. And I'm not a great musician. I'm adequate enough to be able to throw some chords together and write songs, but I can only feel that because I'm expressing something honestly, or in a heartfelt way, or in some way that's not bullshit, that in some way the songs have merit.
I will read biographies or autobiographies while I'm writing, but mostly I put books in a to-read queue, like Rachel Cusk's new novel, "Outline."
TV was the boogey man when I was growing up. Video games are the boogey man now. The novel was once a boogey man. Books about lowborn people doing lowborn things were once considered a real assault on people's morals. Maybe some day video games will be looked on as a good thing, but personally I don't see it.
I reread "Ball Four" by Jim Bouton, the father of all sports books. Aside from that, and books like "Out of Their League" by Dave Meggyesy, sports books generally pull their punches.
I think patience is a skill and I wish I had it.
I think it was W.H. Auden who said he was lucky that his first favorite poet was Thomas Hardy, who was a good but not a great poet, because if you are exposed to the greats too soon it can just squash you as a writer.
I mean, you always want everybody to pat you on the back and tell you you're wonderful every time you do something; I think that's human nature.
When I was a kid I ate sports books up, like "Winners Never Quit" by Phil Pepe. That was like my bible.
On the one hand, people think they own kids; they feel that they have the right to tell the kids what to do. On the other hand, people envy kids. We'd like to be kids our whole lives. Kids get to do what they do. They live on their instincts.
I'm inspired as a writer by any place where I've lived for a significant amount of time that have memories, my past, and stories attached to them, and that's really New York and L.A. Any place where there's ghosts are inspiring.
If my work was good enough, I would never have to do publicity.
In this age of media and Internet access, we are much more talkative than ever before.
We all know people for that length of time and people change. They mature. There is a certain expectation that a fictional character does not change. But you can't go back and play him the same way.
