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

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 didn't just get to 75 years by tiptoeing. I had to work hard sometimes.

Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.

My father was a Norwegian tenor and my mother a New York Irish librarian.

We dont develop courage by being happy every day. We develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

My father was gone when I was three years old.

You know I used to listen to music a lot more.

Hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth.

I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few public officials.

Yes people pull the trigger but guns are the instrument of death. Gun control is necessary and delay means more death and horror.

I teach at Harvard that the world and the heavens, and the stars are all real, but not so damned real, you see.

You can't control the world, but when you control your thoughts, you bring order.

I have an awesome team. We all talk about what projects are the best for me to work on for my career and which ones to pass on.

Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels.

If somebody wants to book Alec Baldwin on one of our shows, and he wants to come on and talk to our people and say what he wants, I don't care. We would question him on his choice of words.

I was watching a black and white television in Cairo, MI., at my grandparents' house, and I watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon. At that point, it set the bit for me to be an astronaut, and it was kind of like a dream, but it really wasn't reality.

What do wealthy people do with their money? They can only buy so many cars, houses, and steak dinners. So we either give it away or invest it.

I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn't even have to mention them out loud to each other.

I think it's a natural human tendency, when you read something, you tend to read a lot of your prejudices into it. And neuroscience is like a lot of disciplines - it has fashions; things change.

I love hard political debate and I love beating somebody on a political point but what I'm more frustrated by is the politics where you play the man not the politics.

Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.

I told him there was one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto.

In the early '90s when the American independent movie started, it held personal vision as a premium. That was brilliant timing.

Even if I'm playing a superhero, it has to be steeped in reality.

I got last-minute rush seats to Baz Luhrmann's 'Boheme,' and my favorite singer, Ekaterina Solovyeva, was playing Mimi that day. My face got burned off when she sang the aria 'Donde Lieta Usci.' The woman was technically sobbing and singing opera at the same time. I don't know how you do that.