I did seven indies because the independent market used to be a lot better before all the stars were doing independents. As a beginning actor, that's where you started.

I know that the work is good and they're excited over at ABC and Disney and it's getting some really good feedback. It's not just a little, insignificant kind of role. It's meaty, which is good.

I grew up on a dirt road with brothers.

I just didn't have time to deliver a Buffalo accent in a day, so I didn't even try it.

I'm a private kind of person.

We're actually doing something scripted that's totally, you know, we kind of know what's going on, however, we're having to live life and death as the art.

I get to actually experience what it would be like to be a psycho, which is not a fun one, or to be a cowboy, or to be a weird character of some sort. For me, it suits me. It suits my personality. I'm an emotional kind of person anyway.

When our minds as people normally starts to wrap around things, we start to attach all these ideas to it that really aren't that necessary to the core of it, if you just experience it and kind of go through it.

I get readings, I sometimes get five a week. You'll feel like a schizophrenic by the end of that week. I don't know who I am any more. You'll be in conversation with a friend and start spitting out dialogue.

Fortunately and unfortunately, people don't see me as a character actor. They see me as a leading man or nothing, which makes it really hard to get work.

I want to stay in Hawaii a little while. I'm kind of liking it over there.

It's actually very freeing to be given permission as an artist to let that ride and to really let it ride, to actually experience it and bring it out of you. It's been uncomfortable and it's freeing at the same time.

They put their feelers out for all the names and then they'll cast you up to the point a name steps up, and then it doesn't matter how much they love you, there's a certain marketing value on that name, and there you go.

I've been doing this for seven and a half years. I've been just bustin' it, trying to break in as an artist in this business. For me, it's still just about the work. I get the scripts and I'm all about that. I don't really even have an idea what that's going to be like.

Being Southern and being the guy I've been all my life, I've lived more on the lighter side of life. I have a dark side, but that's not where I come from. A lot of artists like to come from that.

To establish yourself as a leading man, you're shooting for the smallest point on the target, and you get a lot of judgment thrown at you. It takes a lot for them to get past everything and just watch your art and what you're doing.

Remember Star Trek? They're on this huge ship and they've got all these people, right? But you only see them, maybe they go on some mission and one of them gets killed.

I'm an outdoorsman kind of person, so I don't like the buzz of the crowd, crowd, crowd and all that so much. I mean I don't mind it, but I don't seek it out.

I did seven indies because the independent market used to be a lot better before all the stars were doing independents. As a beginning actor, that's where you started.

TV tends to try and fit everyone into a TV mold.

I wanted to do everything. I wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to be a secret agent. I wanted to be a fireman and a doctor, all that. So I related that through movies and stuff.

I have three brothers and they're all into computers. They're all intellects. My mother would pay me a quarter a page to read a book and I couldn't make 50 cents. I just couldn't do it.

My favorite actor is Wallace Beery.

I've been a very lucky actor.

I don't think I could be happy as an actor if there was a tyrant on the set.

When I was starting to get noticed as an actor in the 1970s for something other than the third cowboy on the right who ended up dying in every movie or episode, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world.

Most parts that can be played by one actor can equally well be played by another, but not this.

I think, frankly, that I'm a better director than I was an actor.

I knew an actor's career goes up and down and back up again. Your standing in this business can't be your whole identity; otherwise, you're doomed.

I don't think any actor feels comfortable watching themselves in movies. You must be very narcissistic. The problem with your own opinion of yourself is that contrary to the normal spectators, when you watch a film you are in, you only watch yourself.

I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.

I never dreamed about being an actor, because that was out of reach. Coming from a small town that was big in farming, and also big in clothing factories, you don't dream about being a professional football player or an actor.

My goal was always to be recognized as a good actor but no one was interested in that, simply because society just wants to warm towards your appearance. This is the great blemish of society.

If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable.

To be honest with you, when I got into this I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

It was very natural for me to want to disappear into dark theater, I am really very shy. That is something that people never seem to fully grasp because, when you are an actor, you are meant to be an exhibitionist.

I think that I've still not been successful at playing the role of the retired actor, and I'd like to work on that.

And once you cease to be a real person, you stop being a good actor.

When I decided I wanted to be an actor, I said I wanted to work with quality actors and directors.

There are roles I want that my agency might not want me to do because of the subject matter or whatever. Or there are roles that people won't bring to me because they don't think I'll do it. And that is a big strain because an actor wants to act.

Reality is, I'm an actor and an entertainer, and I really wouldn't know what to do with another profession.

I still feel like I'm trying to make it. It's hard to shed the struggling actor thing.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite.

Follow the wisdom of the great actor, James Cagney, you hit your mark, you look the other guy in the eye, and you tell the truth.

I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood.

In other words, I wouldn't like to be an actor if I could only be real. I like to get wild, behaviorally wild, and it's crazy to think of any form where it's just one way.

An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.

Oh, well, in Los Angeles everybody is an actor, or a producer, or a writer, or a director, or an agent, or... So everybody understands the hours.

I didn't want to be an actor.