My son walked up to Nicole on the beach and I was throwing the ball for the dogs in the ocean. I was like, 'Max, you get the dogs. I'll talk to the hot blondes.'

I knew I wanted to play "Dr Cox" really bad, which is always a huge mistake because as soon as you want something really bad, maybe you rip up a little bit.

I like to be in waiting rooms with people as they're auditioning, because their terror calms me.

Dr. Cox mentors the rookie doctors with a spoonful of dirt and then a cup of sugar. I see him as an archetypal descendent of two of my favorite curmudgeonly characters: Lou Grant and Louie De Palma.

I would love to have a photographic memory. It would come in handy with the rants I'm given on Scrubs... often on short notice!

TV tends to look for the living equivalents of squeaky-clean Kens and Barbies, but with my dial I'm more like Ken's dirty old uncle.

As an actor, it's great to play a strong leader with a heart of gold.

You go to the hospital your wife's in labor and you're doing the thing, and then it's very disorienting and scary and you beat yourself up and you go through a whole period of 'woe is me' and then you realize that this a gift, this child is the light, and if you can nourish that light and just let it shine, you have an opportunity to get closer to what I think is God.

I did feel Dr. Cox, the character that I was auditioning for, was too similar to the head of the hospital. He was too arrogant and mean. I approached him kind of like I had a miniature Max sitting on my shoulder. I pictured Max saying, "This guy has got to give love every once in a while. He has to!" I knew there had to be tiny little windows of redemption.

My son walked up to Nicole on the beach and I was throwing the ball for the dogs in the ocean. I was like, 'Max, you get the dogs. I'll talk to the hot blondes.'

I felt (a) it was a great role and (b) I wanted to stay in town. I wanted to stop going to these four month and five month gigs up in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver or down in Mexico. I wanted to be around my son, Max. This came along and I was like, "I really want to play this guy!"

'Learn your lines.' I want that on my gravestone.

Groups like the NAACP, The Anti-Defamation League, NOW and GLAAD, will respond to derisive language directed at their constituents. The price paid by those who cavalierly chose to verbally disrespect the dignity of African Americans, Jews, women and homosexuals is steep.

I built a baseball field in the lower part of our property and I'm always working on that. I got a wheelbarrow, a pick and a shovel, and I started to build a baseball field during writers' strike. We have boys and girls come over and we have clinics in the spring. It's called The Strike because it's named for the writers' strike.

I felt (a) it was a great role and (b) I wanted to stay in town. I wanted to stop going to these four month and five month gigs up in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver or down in Mexico. I wanted to be around my son, Max. This came along and I was like, 'I really want to play this guy!'

I got my Equity card from an audition out of Backstage. We did 'Guys and Dolls' and 'Kismet.'

I got the pilot for 'Scrubs' sent to me, and in the margin for Dr. Cox, it said 'a John McGinley type.' So when I went in to audition, I said to Billy Lawrence, who's a dear friend of mine, I said, 'Well, I'm John McGinley.'

I have mixed feelings about 'Car 54, Where Are You?' Because we shot it as a musical and whoever the studio head was at Orion, or whoever the powers that be were, cut all but, like, two musical numbers out of it. That is the same as cutting the musical numbers out of 'The Wizard Of Oz'; it wouldn't be that interesting.

I have no issue with being a character actor. If you've been around enough that people are able to segregate you into that category, it means you're working. So that's good!

I knew I wanted to play 'Dr Cox' really bad, which is always a huge mistake because as soon as you want something really bad, maybe you rip up a little bit.

I wanted to be Red Barber, Mel Allen or Howard Cosell. I loved their personalities and all of their sounds.

I worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange back when they used to write tickets. And I was just a runner. So a guy would write a ticket and I would run it, and it was endless. That was a hard job. And I dug tungsten... for a coal company in Wyoming one summer, and that was pretty miserable.

I'm a homebody. If I'm not working I'm with my family being a dad.

I've always thought Ed Burns was a profoundly underrated actor. He's a great director, obviously. A great director/writer. But I think he's a stunning actor, too.

If you can figure out where you fit into any particular story, you'll be okay. When you're not quite sure where you fit in, you try to be too many parts of the story. You gild the lily. I see it all the time.

If you watch 'E.T.' and say that there are holes in the story because this alien lands, then don't go to the movie! It drives me insane.

On 'Platoon' I was offered in 1984 a very tiny part that Ivan Kane would go on to play. Then the financing fell out, and the film was scuttled for two years.

The conventional wisdom with David Mamet is, you do not change a word. And that agrees with me. If you want to change any of David's words, it's like wanting to change the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare - you should do something else.

What helps writers, and ultimately, obviously, helps the actors - who should serve the words that the writer puts on the page - is if the character has damages, because then the writers can cultivate and excavate, like a dentist going into a tooth.

What's so interesting about 'Point Break' to me is that it's a study of testosterone and adrenaline by a woman. That's why it's little more interesting than it should be.

You go see 'Timothy Green,' and tell me if it doesn't rock your world. I loved it. I loved every frame of it.

When you left on Saturday, I felt a horrible void, I saw you everywhere, on the beach, in your room, in the garden: impossible for me to get used to the idea that you had left.

Of course The Beach Boys will be camp.

Babies don't need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach... it pisses me off! I'll go over to a little baby and say 'What are you doing here? You haven't worked a day in your life!'

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

I like to cook, walk on the beach, go to concerts and look at fine art.

It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.

I've never been one to run around in Speedos on the beach.

You know, The Beach Boys' image is kinda like a group Doris Day, you know what I mean?

The pictures we saw before we got down here didn't even touch the reality of what it is like being here. We can be right on the beach with all the devastation and still not be able to imagine what it was like when the wall of water actually came up.

I've been kind of submerged in my own little geographic location for a really long time in Venice Beach.

We filmed one scene on the beach and there was definitely weird energy around, and we were followed around by a white owl to several different locations, and little things like that, or certain mishaps would happen and you'd have to wonder what that was about.

The British are so funny. It's like they can't believe I lived in Hackney. 'You could live in Bondi Beach. Why would you want to live in 'Ackney?' But Hackney's fantastic. I'm serious. There are so many artists there. I loved the markets, the parks, the pubs, the diversity. It was a cultural melting-pot.

I rent houses in LA when I'm filming. I find the isolation there terrifying. There's nowhere to go, there's nowhere to be with people. I'm not a beach bunny.

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

The moon is essentially gray, no color. It looks like plaster of Paris, like dirty beach sand with lots of footprints in it.

And I was in another band called Flash In The Pan, which was soca, Latin music, down in Laguna Beach.

They were heading out to the middle of the bay - the Gulf - that's another thing that became kind of standard practice, we didn't hurry the destroyers around the beach any more, when it got dark, we'd take 'em out thirty or forty miles out in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf.

I manage a team, for beach soccer. I'm the coach. Player, coach.