In television you go in with this operating system that it is a crapshoot.

I am not a long-run actor. I admire actors who can do that.

I'd forgotten I'd done the anime called Spirited Away, the English version of a Japanese film.

High school music teachers... nobody makes a living off it.

Very often when I go in to meet for movies or pilots, I'm put on videotape. I hate the notion that that tape is going to sit on a shelf and never get better.

Kids now are so used to surround sound and the power in theater speakers, that the concert hall is a disappointment to them.

I've played Lear three times, I would love to do it again.

Something happens to us all when we experience something as a unit that doesn't occur when we're on our couches or holding our little portable DVD players.

Every time I hear, Cut. Print, something cold and electrical goes off in my head, because I'm never going to change that film.

It's rare to be treated like a friend you haven't met in a Hollywood meeting.

It's really important to stay engaged and involved in the character.

You hear the same work by different orchestras, different conductors, violinists, pianists, singers, and slowly, the work reveals itself and begins to live deeper in you.

I will never master this craft. Orchestras are very, very forthcoming with me.

If it's right and true, it's listened to and accommodated.

Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten.

Because I don't take money, I'll go anywhere and do a benefit concert with almost any orchestra.

People are nice enough, but you can hear the giant tick of the second hand. People are so harried.

I love pulling people into concert halls who might not otherwise go and getting their ears tuned.

What we have to get clear to kids is that when you offer your stillness and open yourself to the experience of music, it pays you back more than you give.

A lot affects the outcome. It boils down to scheduling and the commitment of the network.

Very often, I don't make it through moments of recording because it is genuinely funny and absolutely ridiculous that a 60-year-old grown man is making these noises.

My father, who died a few years ago, was a good, simple, very honest man. His faith and affection for his family was just unassailable, without question.

Writing is hard work. Generating stories that catch people's attention and holding it are very difficult.

I had a meeting in LA in which they took a really overstuffed hour and a half. It was as close to old Hollywood as I remembered it in the last 20 years.

We lament the speed of our society and the lack of depth and the nature of disposable information.

There are a couple of roles I haven't played that I want to. I would love to play Shiloh.

I am certainly not a mainstream religious man.

In television you go in with this operating system that it is a crapshoot.

When something really extreme happens, you have to find a way to embrace that and include it in how you think about the character. Sometimes it's not easy.

Fun can happen on the interior. Nobody knows about it, but there are fireworks going on inside your spirit when you hear a great orchestra playing great music.

The ebulliently sharp mind of 'White Christmas' director Walter Bobbie made me tremble and strive in the same breath. The deceptively 'simple' dialogue of David Ives, asking every actor to just. say. it. Float it on the breeze; it doesn't need 'explanation,' just energy and truth.

Fortunately, I happened to go east at a time when live television was centered in New York.

I'm not up on today's television for children, because it's mostly cartoons that don't seem to interest me.

The young people look great on television. They're youthful and have a lot of zip and energy, but when you see them live, they can only do about 20 minutes because they haven't got the training to hold an audience for an hour and a half or so.

At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.

It's about the power of design and the power of the human spirit. It's above paying anybody to do something stupid for money like reality television does - like ambushing people.

Baseball hasn't been the national pastime for many years now - no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television.

Networks decide who will have a chance to do shows, but it is the viewers who make the final decision of who stays and who goes. I am very fortunate, in that the television viewers of our country have decided that Bob Barker can stay.

Twin Peaks was special because it was so groundbreaking. In the early '90s it really changed television a lot. A bunch of weird shows, like Northern Exposure, came on after that.

We're just dealing with the kind of warp and woof of television ratings.

I did I Love My Wife on Broadway in 1978, and then went into television land. Now things are starting to come together in the way I thought they might when I was a kid.

I think what we need is a more welcoming mode from the people who put on a hundred million country-western shows on television. How about a monthly jazz show?

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

I've directed a fair amount of television series - so I'm always trying to learn new things. One episode was all hand-held and I'm trying to get better at when you should do things and when you should just shut up and watch what the people are saying.

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

I'd really been wanting to do a television series. I was looking for a comedy.

It gets kinda monotonous, but that's television. There are plus sides and down sides. The positive side is that you have steady work for nine months of the year for however many years your show is on TV,.

Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn't exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.

It is a significant acknowledgment that the way people are watching television is changing and the model is quickly changing.