As an actor, you want to keep your demons to some extent, but you also have to exorcise them so you can use them instead of them using you.

In this business, you're either Brad Pitt right away, or you're already going down the ladder.

As an actor, you want to keep your demons to some extent, but you also have to exorcise them so you can use them instead of them using you.

I think people could justify labeling me if they saw a pattern in what I do, but right now that's impossible.

I had gone to school to study marine biology.

I scored a 910 on my SAT. I didn't care about education. I don't know what I cared about.

I guess I'm a little charmed. I never thought this would happen so quick.

Everybody else has been seen, been proven.

I think I'm extremely vulnerable and that in some ways I seek out rejection. Never feeling like you're getting that pat on the back from dad is probably at the heart of that.

As a kid I used to pretend I was John Denver, of all people, and play the guitar and sing Take Me Home, Country Roads.

I would take William H. Macy as a teacher any day of the week. He's incredible. He's got a lot of hard-earned experience.

The more you understand me, the less characters I can play.

Whatever labels are being pinned on me have nothing to do with me.

I think when someone becomes an actor, people say, Aw, you could see it in him when he was little. But I think you can see that quality in every little kid.

There's a lot of reasons you can think of to say why you act, but I can only say that it just felt good. At the same time, it felt really painful. It's still troubling and stressful to me.

I grew up in a small farming town called Concord, outside Charlotte in North Carolina.

Any time I got in emotional turmoil, I felt sick all the time, like at any minute I would die.

I think you have to refill the well at some point.

I'm an actor, coming from New York theater.

The whole Indian thing, I always say it's really the American holocaust. It's something we need to look at.

I'm not the most talkative guy in the world.

People said, That's great for your career, but what have you done? I kept feeling I had to defend myself.

Everyone's really lazy in L.A.

Ambiguity in directors is a hard thing to deal with.

I didn't even go to my prom. I didn't have one date in high school.

There's been a boiling down of real emotion into a set pattern instead of individualism.

I feel like I want to crawl out of my skin, especially when people start questioning me.

What's the classical moment that every actor or actress deals with? A tragic thing. They get that blank, faraway look in their eyes. But in life, it's not that way.

My mom's been married three times; my dad has been married a lot. I didn't really see my dad that much.

I get to play a killer next.

My problem with interviews, one day I'll think one thing, and the next day I'll think the exact opposite.

Ultimately, it's a pretty confusing moment.

The Native American side was tragic. It's just unbelievable what has happened to them.

Because of the need to remove all modernism, we stayed in the middle of nowhere all day long, living out of tents. It was cold. It definitely set the scene.

I don't use the techniques I learned at NYU much anymore.

I was nicknamed Skeeter in Little League because I was small and fast, like a mosquito flying across the outfield.

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.