You can change the circumstances but you can never change man's inner nature.

Really, I was such a late bloomer, I really didn't learn how to be me until I was in my late '40s, which is when I started playing roles that were closer to me.

I don't ever want to be comfortable with anything I'm doing.

Let me put it this way: I definitely need to understand the villains I play. The best cause pain to anesthetize themselves against their own pain.

The thing that's cool about the recording booth is that it's so perfunctory, so cut-to-the-chase.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

I've never worked with a tail, that I can remember. But there's so much I can't remember.

Somebody who doesn't care if they live or die is the most dangerous human being on earth.

So much of my aesthetic was formed by my dad.

I actually think it's harder to play vulnerability, because you're having to delve deeper into portions of your own psyche, what it is that makes you human.

I don't think that I've had a career like anyone else's, but there are hosts and hosts of actors whose careers I admire.

I think there are a lot of technocrats in the business who would much rather work with just wheels and gears and machinery. Those things interest them more than humanity and I wish them the best of luck.

I lost 90 pounds and my blood pressure went down to a normal level and the salt in my urine disappeared. And that was when I had to make the transition from fat character actor to thin character actor.

I never direct myself, because I don't like working with me. I would punch me in the mouth if I had to take my direction.

I will not do a role that I don't think I can do, that I'm not interested in, where there's no humanity, that doesn't have any kind of handle for me at all because I know I'll just stink the joint up.

The great thing about arriving at this age is that I don't even care about my career anymore.

You draw on your own childhood every time you tee it up as an actor.

I'm a city boy.

Some of the great characters that I've played had to be transformational.

I live in a bubble.

Season 4 can be deadly for a show that's been a hit show.

I couldn't make it on the swimming team in high school. In fact, I got thrown off the swimming team and was forced to audition for the school play because they had at the audition about 35 girls show up and no boys, so my swimming coach suggested that I might be able to do the drama department more good than I was doing the swimming team.

I'm very happy.

Well, I don't have an agenda.

I do voicework all the time.

Well, I love acting, and I love acting quick.

I've been a professional actor for almost 40 years.

I'm fully aware that things that resonate and become real hits are the exception to the rule, so much so that I've wired myself for failure.

I'm kind of one of these guys who wants to play everything once before it's all over.

I think in the early part of my career, the roles were so disparate that it never gave anybody an opportunity to understand my essence and what I would be good at doing, as opposed to what I would not be good at doing, so these little moments of beautiful things that were happening to me were consistent, but very few and very far between.

Every job has a unique situational circumstance.