Jeremy Piven

I want to be radical on the inside, but not on the outside.

Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn't done my job.

One of the great things that you should never do that I learned from John Malkovich is to never judge your characters.

Everyone's journey is completely different.

I relished the opportunity to be on Broadway... It's the holy grail for people like me.

The reality is that I'm an actor from the Midwest and I was 40 movies into it before I started 'Entourage'.

I have a place in Chicago and I get there as much as I can. The city is so unbelievably beautiful. It's one of the greatest cities on the planet. My heart beats differently when I'm in Chicago. It slows down and I feel more at ease.

I'm not a boy now. I'm a man, I hope. I hope I've had my artistic bar mitzvah somewhere.

I'm just a stage actor from Chicago.

I have a place in Chicago and I get there as much as I can... The city is so unbelievably beautiful. It's one of the greatest cities on the planet. My heart beats differently when I'm in Chicago. It slows down and I feel more at ease.

I'm just mystified and fascinated by women, and I'm still single. Hence all of that, and the fact that I celebrate them so much, I understand that I'm unevolved at this exact moment to share my life with one. I wouldn't inflict that upon anyone yet. But, I'm getting closer.

We all have so many different elements inside of us and we're not all one thing.

The stage is my love, it's where I started and where I do my best work.

When I was growing up, I was always on stage but I loved other things.

I feel, as a person, very uninteresting.

I grew up on the stage, where you just throw yourself into projects and don't get in your own way.

I never made more than $50 doing any play in Chicago. That was the way I grew up.

John Cusack and I have been friends since childhood, and the fact that we're in so many films together is, no pun intended, serendipitous.

I like to box. It's a great release.

I'm not a pretty boy who came to town and burst out of the gate, which is a good thing, because if I was, I probably wouldn't have been good enough then. I probably wouldn't have lasted. So I was very lucky not to be pretty.

The Dalai Lama was once asked for his favorite chant, and he said it was better not to have a favorite anything, which I think is a great thought.

Yet the reality is that I'm a stage actor from the Midwest - probably the opposite of a shark agent.

The biggest compliment to me is that guys really approach me and they have a connection with me, so there must be something I'm doing that is authentic, otherwise they wouldn't connect with me so strongly. It's a real compliment.

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones.

All I've done is work... I arrived in Los Angeles in my early 20s and I've been pounding the pavement ever since.

I'm not a video game guy. I would rather throw around a football.

I was in a play directed by my father, and I was doing a fight scene, and the choreography went haywire, and I flew backward over a chair and ripped my thumb all the way to my wrist and had to have surgery to sew up all the tendons in there.