I feel, as a person, very uninteresting.

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

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

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.

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 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.

I feel, as a person, very uninteresting.

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.

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.

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

Everyone's journey is completely different.

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

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 like to box. It's a great release.

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

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

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.

I'm just a stage actor from Chicago.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

When you hire a plumber because no hot water is coming out of the kitchen sink faucet, you need to go to the water heater, not the faucet.

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.

I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits.

It's definitely a shock to go from being 15 in high school to working. There's no real cushion there. There's no preparation at all. You learn by doing.

Should 50 per cent of Telefilm's projects be helmed, produced, or written by women? I think so.

Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind.

On 'There Will Be Blood,' I was cast at the last minute. I had 3 and a half to 4 days to get ready for the first day. I just went for it, threw myself in there and gave it everything I had. That was just guts and instinct, not a lot of preparation.

When you get moved around, it can be jarring, but it helps to fine-tune your focus in the middle of the season, when other guys are getting a little lackadaisical.

It's not that I can't be fooled, but I'm not fooled often.

I'm really visually stimulated more than anything. I don't really listen to music. I'm more into watching telly or watching movies and visual art.

As soon as you reach a certain age, you're thrown onto a kind of mental scrap heap.

I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else.

The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

I want to let fans know how much I appreciate them and how much I appreciate them showing interest in our music and me personally.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

As far as I'm concerned, it's no good being able to wail out smokin' leads if your rhythm chops hugg!

People always say you never know love until you have your own child and all of that is true.

Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.

Thatch your roof before rainy weather; dig your well before you become parched with thirst.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

It was a very bizarre experience for me, to get the songs together, go in there, and try to deliver them as I would perhaps in a live setting. But I realized that I couldn't take on that coffeehouse style that I came from and go in there and burn it up.