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

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.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

I think it would have been a lot better for him to say, I did it and I'm sorry, McGwire was never one to show a lot of emotion on the field, not a player who sought attention and craved to be thought of as a nice guy.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

A person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion.

I think we actually punish children out of their relationship with their bodies... we categorically separate mind and body and emotion and intellect.

And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the brain that sent them forth has crumpled into dust, how vitally important it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with the keenest possible restraint.

My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.

I have the ability to sing with emotion and feeling, but if you say I sound like Billie Holiday, that's cool. Let's look at who Billie was: she was this person, this singer, this beautiful diva who could move the audience with the slightest gesture of her hand.

I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.

I tried to have more than one emotion on the record.

I have lived too completely, I think. I have known every human emotion.