Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the cu...
I don't like improv at all. It terrifies me. I like to know exactly what I'm going to say. Being surprised does make me a better actor. Anytime I'm afraid of something that makes me rise to the occasion, it scares me, but it's what makes great actors...
Screen is satisfying because it's so technical and mysterious. It's like playing roulette: you get a script, you think it's either great or naff, but you have no idea how it will really turn out. On stage, you are your own editor - and you get brief ...
When you've got a teenager and a pre-teen, especially a son and a daughter, and they're going at each other at the table, all you really want is just five minutes of quiet, but sometimes I have a moment during the chaos when I think, 'Yes, this is go...
I have never, for a single moment, been aware of pressure from anyone in television about how I dress, what my shape is or how I speak. I've always written my own scripts. I've always been the first to point out that I need to be fit. I need to look ...
The moment a large investor doesn't believe a government will pay back its debt when it says it will, a crisis of confidence could develop. Investors have scant patience for the years of good governance - politically fraught fiscal restructuring, aus...
The next time I write a play - in order to get audience trust for a particular sort of tragic line, I'll try to bring the audience a good distance before that. Part of that is allowing comic moments to occur. I had been afraid of that - that once the...
I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then...
I got a manager, and I thought, since I was going out on auditions, I should do this for a living. Then there was this moment on set when I realized I was having a lot of fun, and I really wanted to do this forever. I want to do different stuff, but ...
I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments.
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 beau...
I would consider myself a perfectionist, yeah. I don't think that is always that helpful, either. Sometimes it's good to be a little more open-minded; you can overthink things when things are actually fine, and it's that moment that you lose it. Look...
I've come to recognize what I call my 'inside interests.' Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news, but in hindsight, I often tried to look for some insigh...
We're very open and outspoken about our faith and our beliefs. We also talk about our doubts, our moments of insecurities. We talk about it all day, how we're inspired by God. We recognize little miracles every day, and that's how we're raising our d...
I'm not so much in the future as always in the present. The future always takes care of itself. What I do now with my video camera, it can only record what is happening now. I am celebrating reality and the essence of the moment. And that's the great...
I'm all for past influences; the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at any given moment is billiard balls whose past determines our future course. That doesn't take into account that we are f...
A lot of people celebrate their past, but I don't look at it all. I don't Google myself; I focus on the future. This is a volatile profession, and the moment you start thinking you've got something, that's when the floor beneath you falls through, so...
It's funny, one of my most solid carpet moments happened in the very beginning, before I started thinking that I needed all these other people to do my hair and makeup, and pick out my clothes. I wore a cheetah sweater and a red hat, and it's one of ...
The commentary track became a lot like the movie and there are some funny, long, awkward pauses that you can tell we're just trying to find stuff to say. None of us had gotten to really talk about the movie until that moment and they were in New York...
I'm proud of 'The Hidden.' I feel like we took a B-movie and kind of turned it into an A-minus action movie. We kind of elevated the material a little bit. It's got a great car-chase scene at the very beginning. It has some terrific moments in it, so...
The funny thing is that I almost find it more difficult now to take a still picture than to be behind a moving camera. I'm just so much more inspired and comfortable and confident when I have that whole operation going. I feel more connected. Snappin...
