"Most experienced performers will say that they don't get nervous.  I don't get nervous anymore because everything that can be go wrong in my shows has already happened.  I've knocked my table over.  I've had an audience volunteer start crying.  I've had props break.  I've injured myself.  Literally anything that can go wrong has gone wrong, and now I know what to do when it does."

"Your job [as an actor] is to create an interesting, captivating character that serves the text.  That's it."

"You need life experience. ... You can't tell someone how to think and feel in it, you have to be in it."

"I was going to do something that I loved—and hopefully I'd be good at it—instead of doing something I was good at but didn't love." (on choosing acting over police science)

"The Oscars are like a political campaign.  Winning an Oscar is partly to do with how good your film is and partly to do with how tenacious you are during awards season."

"You have to be willing to go to the place [in your mind] you don't want to go from time to time."

"Mamet and Macy's method to deconstruct the fundamental unit of a novelist, a playwright or a screenwriter's Storytelling is a Godsend. Read A Practical Handbook for the Actor, the meat of what came out of Mamet and Macy’s lectures and the foundation of The Atlantic Theater Company in New York. It's so simple, direct and easy to understand, it's mind blowing."

"As an actor, you need to embrace the darkness within you as well."

"I had firm convictions of the importance of popular art, and of its power to make life seem richer and better.  I knew in my bones that drama need not be elitist."

"The fun of most plays is seeing actors react to each other."

"I'm trying to find truths that are underrepresented on screen, to embrace nuance and ambiguity."

"If your character doesn't have a goal, she's just a bunch of your words deceptively held together by an actor."

"First rule of writing a play (or acting, lighting design, directing): Make a choice. You can always change it later."

"The so-called Stanislavsky Method rests on two principles: that the actor's body is an instrument that must be supple, strong, and prepared; and that craft is always secondary to the truth of emotional connection."

"Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting or living itself, which is the greatest art of all ... creativity, at heart, is the essence of man's being."

"It's this funny headspace you get in, where you're acting, really.  ....  You literally pretend you are this person, and you go about your life as if you are this person.  And so, when people will ask me, 'Did you like this character?' I don't know.  Because I'm so far inside them, I can't judge them at all.  You're behaving as if you are this person."

"Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull."