I had a Southern accent but I had broken it so hard.

Comedy is so hard; it's so much harder than drama. The pacing of it, the energy of it.

I'm challenged by people like Russell Crowe and Sean Penn who come in with such incredible discipline and power.

I had a Southern accent but I had broken it so hard.

I think that often times Hollywood panders to the cliches of small town life, specifically Southern small town life, and I think that this movie does the opposite.

I want to be so strong as an actor that people wouldn't say... eh, that's Josh Lucas.

I'll look at the script and I'll try to find as many books, movies, and pieces of music that I think are going to feed each scene or the character as a whole.

Always do something different. Always different things.

I got so used to being unstable that I started to only be comfortable being unstable.

On A Beautiful Mind, there was a wall of math.

It's funny, but we were living on this small island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina when I was 9.

There's such good people out there where there filmmaking world is alive.

I've worked with some incredibly difficult directors but my understanding is that a lot of the best people are driven from a place of being extremely challenging and dark within their way.

I think actors become jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none.

I visited those friends who'd just had a baby, and she was washing dishes and he was cleaning the house, and I burst with happiness. And in their minds, they were in this terrible domestic rut.

I'm right at a time when I'm strongly finding my identity inside of my work.

When I was on that boat, I realized the only way I would feel creatively challenged was if I totally changed everything about my environment and put myself in a storm, in a sense.

I love experiencing other people's realities, seeing the world through their eyes for a short period of time.

My instincts are not comedic.

This fear of death infused me with the desire to live, and to live harder.

The Hulk, that was the experience of my life, so far.

I had friends of mine tell me they had a baby, and I didn't even know they were pregnant.

Every day is intense and alive, whether it's travel, work, even down time, which there is so little of.

New York has got this sort of wonderful romantic idea of the South.

So when we finally settled down outside of Seattle I felt totally uncomfortable with that idea.

No, well, my father's definitely not Christopher Walken.

My nomadic childhood dramatically fed my eventual decision to be an actor, but not in the way you might think.

I love how people in this business push themselves to know themselves, the world, and their creativity better.

It was a long period of time where I tried to figure out what worked, what didn't work.

I think I've spent so much time playing characters that are so far away from me and learning how to technically build and how to technically put something on top of you.

It's the South that maintains the idea that they're different, which is interesting because nobody else really cares.

At a certain point, even if the one alpha male is dominant, at a certain point there's a younger lion that is stronger, and everyone knows it.

Wrap parties can be really sad, actually, disorienting.

Once everyone else around you starts to become incredibly comfortable - if anything, quite happy with what you are doing - then I start to settling in and trusting all those choices that I've made up to that point.

I don't think I understand the concept of regret. Because if I regret anything, that would mean, like, I hate myself.

Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage.

I know that nobody can become a star without a team.

Change is the only constant, and to turn one's back and pretend that it is not coming is an exercise in futility.

I think most of the world would like to be Scottish. All the Americans who come here never look for English blood or Welsh, only for Scottish and Irish. It's understandable. The Scots effectively created the face of the modern world: the railways, the bridges, the tunnels.

From plants that wake when others sleep, from timid jasmine buds that keep their odour to themselves all day, but when the sunlight dies away let the delicious secret out to every breeze that roams about.

When you think of all the conflicts we have - whether those conflicts are local, whether they are regional or global - these conflicts are often over the management, the distribution of resources. If these resources are very valuable, if these resources are scarce, if these resources are degraded, there is going to be competition.

Any artist that is even surviving right now is a dark horse because things change pretty fast. You're a superstar one day and wake up the next day and you're anonymous. To be successful in any way is beating the odds right now, I think.

Growing up, I had really bad skin. I had a skin disorder. Yes, I did. And my mother went to great lengths to try to find something to remedy it. I remember she took a trip to Madagascar and came back with all these alternative, medicinal herbs and stuff. They didn't smell so good, but I think they worked some magic.

No one understands the shift in priorities about having a child in your life... until you have a child in your life.

I would like to find, or I would like a part to come to me that is like the part that Dennis Franz was fortunate to be able to play on 'NYPD Blue,' a sort of similar-looking actor to me, a generic, bald white guy who you would often think of as playing the authority figure. But he was the disgruntled middle-man. That would be a fun character.

The laws of decency enforce themselves.

A wise man is someone who knows how to convert obstacles into resources.

One of the ill effects of cruelty is that it makes the bystanders cruel.

You see, we are not machines and we do not have lots of ideas in a drawer.