It is always good to explore the stuff you don't agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way, and always end up learning something I didn't know.
Traits like humility, courage, and empathy are easily overlooked - but it's immensely important to find them in your closest relationships.
Doing the right thing has power.
When you're dying, you're liberated to do what you want to do. You give yourself permission. I think everyone's experience with a terminal disease is so deeply personal and unique to the person, the context in which they're living and the relationships that they have.
I believe that no matter what you do in life, if you learn the basics through theater, it will help you in everything else - problem solving, communication, discipline, all of that stuff.
Comedy is a way to make sense of chaos. It's a way of dealing with things that are overwhelming, that threaten you; it's a way to survive and get closer to the truth.
When you tell people, your world changes, your identity changes and people treat you differently. And then, not only do you have to deal with your own emotional response to what's going on, but you take on everybody else's emotional response.
I find that things don't bother me as much. If I had a bad day on set, it sort of just rolls of my back in a way that it didn't before. So that's where the biggest difference is, stuff that used to get under my skin or that I would worry about or be anxious about just isn't a problem. So in some ways, having a child has been very liberating. I found it very liberating.
The entertainment industry is terrified of silence.
I get very, very, very irritable with people who complain about getting old, because I know a lot of people who would gladly trade places with us. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm not saying it doesn't hurt your feelings, I'm not saying it's not painful - and physically as well as mentally and spiritually - and it's frightening at times. However, people have really lost perspective, and it's a really bizarre topic of conversation that it's become a cultural peg in our world that aging is a bad thing. It's not logical to me.
Most scripts are written to be green lit. They're not written to be acted. And a lot of writers with the greatest intention in the world don't write for actors. They don't understand the architecture of what an actor needs to get from point A to point B.
Theater is the foundation of how I live my life, actually. My father was a playwright, so I was around it all the time and loved to talk shop with him, just loved it. And basically everything that I hold to be good and true and worthy, I learned in the theater. So not even just about the work, but just about life. Discipline, problem solving, creativity, how to get along with people.
Fear, anxiety and neurosis: that's just in the suitcase when you're an actor.
People's view of cancer will change when they have their own relationship with cancer, which everyone will, at some point.
We all have a limited amount and that it's a privilege to grow old. That's something that I think a lot of people have forgotten in this very fast-paced world where youth is overly celebrate.
I think everybody handles things very differently and you can conjecture, but until you're put in that situation, you really don't know.
I'm very hard on my bags because I tend to carry a lot of stuff with me.
That's my favorite food group: donut. I love the donut.
I had learning disabilities, and I couldn't express myself in the written word.
You have a lot more to give, the older you get. And you want to give it. I mean, some people want to give it. But there is a desire to pass down, to have a hand in the past and a hand in the future. There's a continuum.
I get cold - really cold - when I travel.
Ask "why" until there is no more "why."
I think the way we talk about cancer has really evolved. I remember the way my grandmother used to talk about it, like a death sentence, no-one would even mention the word.
What people can survive and what they don't survive is shocking to me. Someone can go to Iraq and be blown to bits and survive. Someone can trip and fall on the street and they die - that's that.
What I find so interesting about people is the choices they make, and how that effects their behavior, their sense of self and their relationships.
