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

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.

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.