I'm from the theater. I never wanted to be a star.

I played the best role I've ever seen on TV or film in the last five years. It was hugely gratifying.

You can't mess up. If you do, everyone wants to kill you.

It took the producers a while to realize I wanted a full-bodied life. I wanted to get out before I felt I'd sacrificed so much to get somewhere that I couldn't afford to leave.

They understood why I left ER. It wasn't just about a guy.

Physics has the cutest words.

People can get certain good things out of fame, but until it killed a princess nobody ever talked about how bad it can be.

It took a long time to get out of my contract. The producers thought I was negotiating for more money.

When you walk away from a really wonderful job like that, you start messing with everyone's priorities. It's like you're dissing them.

Only the patients have to take off their clothes. I think I'm pretty safe.

There's only so much you can do with an attorney on a show that's about New York policemen.

I'm a terrible patient, and I find that doctors can be very condescending.

I'm incredibly happy to be doing my own thing in New York.

I had my electricity turned off three times because I never had time to pay my bills. It was a joke. I'm making a ton of money, and I'm walking around my apartment with flashlights.

I love going to the set every day, because Noah Wylie will be there waiting.

I'm from the theater. I never wanted to be a star.

I love having no sense of tomorrow or yesterday.

I don't get rattled about the big things. I get rattled when I have to pick up my laundry, get gas in the car, pick up a script.

I never wanted to be a star.

It's amazing how everyone has an opinion on how you should live your life.

Series television is either a nightmare or the best thing in the whole world. It really depends on, I think, where you are in your life.

Why does anybody want to be famous? You know what's important to me? Having lunch! Pasta! Seeing my friends! Is that so crazy?

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.

In a theater, the part is mine and I can control it as I want to. In the movies, I don't have direct contact, and I am fighting technical machinery.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.

Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.

I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.

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.

Sheer flattery got me into the theater. Flattery always works with me, particularly the flattery of women.

Actually, I didn't like Dartmouth very much, but the whole theater scene I really liked.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

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.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.

You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.

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'd also like to do a play. I've never done theater, and constantly changing and refining a performance is something I'd like to do, even though it may sound like work to some people - and it probably is work.

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

And I'm in favor of that because I have a gay son, who's a very successful theater designer.

Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.

I started acting when I was 10, doing musical theater. I was a brunette at that time. I was always cast in all the exotic parts.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

I really would rather have gone to New York, since all my training had been in theater, but I didn't have the guts to go there alone. I knew only one person in New York, and that was a man. What I needed was a woman. That's the way Southern girls thought.

I've always just gone with the best role, and I don't care if it's in theater, film or television.

Playing in front of an audience was just such a turn-on for me, and you have 200 people in the audience and it's like doing live theater. And filming something that goes to millions of people several weeks later, it's an interesting dynamic.

I was obsessed with romance. When I was in high school, I saw 'Doctor Zhivago' every day from the day it opened until the day it left the theater.

I'm supposed to be a pretty good theater actor.