I'm much more a writer than an actor. Although I have a great respect for that and I enjoy acting still, it really is about the world that I'm creating. That's where my future is.
Eventually, I want to be a creative producer that isn't in things. The acting is more of a secondary thing for me now.
I've always been fairly confident in my acting.
Running has been great for keeping me fit throughout my acting career.
I like to feel that something's alive in acting, like something's really going on.
Well, I'm never happier than when I'm acting.
Acting is not just doing! It is who you are being and what you are experiencing that causes you to do - to need to act. Then doing turns arounds and changes your being. But doing without being is lifeless.
Acting is just playing the violin in an orchestra. Directing is being the conductor.
As an actor, you only get to work 15 minutes an hour; as a director you're fully immersed. It's incredibly more complex and challenging and I love it. I'm sort of a glutton for work and to direct something that I'm acting in feeds the vein.
Acting is not terribly important work, and I have always felt a bit of guilt about pursuing something that is so selfish. I love doing it, but it is never something that feels like it's going to change or save the world.
I discovered I loved acting at a Summer Camp. That's when I really realised that I enjoyed it and that I wanted to try it.
In 2003, I had the pleasure of acting in three films.
Recording is more autobiographical than acting. It's me - either how I'm feeling then or once felt at some point in my life. It's all me.
I think the best way for me to go into auditions psychologically was to say, 'You're not going to get it. This is the only acting experience you're going to have with this material.'
I didn't start acting until I was 27, and that was just through Gary Shandling and Ben Stiller who I knew through stand-up. And they both in the same year offered me parts on their programs which was unbelievably lucky and fortuitous.
I wound up getting a lot of other opportunities in the nineties, and then sort of as quickly as it started, it just as quickly ended around 2001. And so yeah, I'd love to continue acting but it's just not up to me.
I find acting slightly nerve racking, but I like the challenge.
I'm always changing and learning about acting, and about myself. I just hope to always keep doing that.
I wish James Dean would never have died. Then he'd be fat and acting on Dynasty or something. There wouldn't be this whiny-boy act that's so prevalent everywhere.
Successful actors and actresses have to get themselves into their roles before acting. Therefore, you need to really care about what you are saying.
What's totally terrifying is that, unlike a musician who has a musical instrument, or a painter that's got a canvas and a brush, acting is us. Our energy, our soul, our spirits. And it's so hard because it's so vulnerable. You're exposing everything.
I knew that my newfound activism and feminism was going to improve my acting, because I was seeing things not just in very narrow, individual, kind of Freudian terms, but seeing them in a much broader, societal way that was going to deepen and enrich my talent.
Between 18 and 26 I acted professionally, on the stage and a little bit on television. Acting is okay, but it's quite pressurized. Then I went to England - I wanted to reinvent myself.
Acting has been very useful to me.
I came into acting with that sort of dull, meet-with-triumph-and-disaster-the-same philosophy and it's been the right one for me.
