Something I learned as an actor was which scenes needed to be rehearsed and which actors are good with rehearsal, which actors learn from it, and which ones grow stale because they start to second-guess themselves.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

What good am I? I can’t have kids. I can’t cook. I’ve been divorced three times. Who would want me?

My role 14 years ago in Richard III – that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it – they have all the fun!

I think, as far as branching out with acting, it would take something really right on the mark to distract me from music, because music is everything to me.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

I don’t ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It’s like, ‚Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.‘

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves… self-discipline with all of them came first.

I’ve always had my own access to the public, because I started off making my clothes for a little shop, and so I’ve always had people buying them. I could always sell a few, even if I couldn’t sell a lot, and somehow my business grew because people happened to like it. I’m in a fortunate position.

I tried acting, liked it, and stuck with it. I saw it as the way I would keep that promise to myself of getting back at those who had made my school life a misery.

There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn’t how we’ve approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.

People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.

Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

At one point, I didn’t care. Now I want as many people to hear my music as possible.

I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.

All I have to say is basically if performing, singing, acting, and dancing is what you want to do, then you just have to do it – no matter where it is.

Stupidly it should not be. It should be also nice. One must get along with that. Is however not necessary.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it.

I don’t think I’m such an amazing person who needs to be written about.

Failure is not an option. Everyone has to succeed.

I believe that every person is born with talent.

I think I’ve developed, as many people do, this sense of, ‚Don’t say the wrong thing, or else people will point at you and laugh.‘

I am able to play monsters well. I understand monsters. I understand madmen.

You know, when I have a bad game, it continues to humble me and know that, you know, you still have work to do and you still have a lot of people to impress.

Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.

We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change.

I want to let you in on a little secret: I don’t always feel like I’m a success. That’s right. There are plenty of times when I feel like I’ve just totally messed up and failed to connect with the people I’m trying to communicate with.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody; I don’t know who or what, maybe myself.

When I was into my 30s, I became increasingly depressed by rejection letters. I had had the feeling that by the time I was 30, I would be established. But I was not at all. By the time of ‚Lives of Girls and Women,‘ I was into my 40s and I had become more thin-skinned.

Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.

Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

When the first big paycheque with ‚Dumb And Dumber‘ hit, I went: ‚Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?‘ But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.

I’d go from film to film and almost detach from one world and jump in another. I was living as these people and not having a self. I didn’t know who I was. And things just get really dark.

When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

One thing I’ve tried to never do is make wish lists. I try to have a very steppingstone mentality about this whole thing, where as soon as you make one step you visualize the next step, not five steps ahead.

Acting is just a process of relaxation, actually. Knowing the text so well and trusting that the instinct and the subconscious mind, whatever you want to call it, is going to take over.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.

You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That’s how you know you’re still alive.

The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.

Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else’s hands, but not you.

Coaching wouldn’t be for me. No, certainly not.

We think it’s fun for our kids to have cameos and join us on set, but not to be actors. That’s not our goal for Brad and me at all. I think we would both prefer that they didn’t become actors.

Sometimes I think my husband is so amazing that I don’t know why he’s with me. I don’t know whether I’m good enough. But if I make him happy, then I’m everything I want to be.

On ‚Grey’s Anatomy‘ I wouldn’t care what I was playing – I would play a corpse, ‚cause I love it that much. It is deep true love, and it will never die.

When you’re supposed to be close and friends in the film, the moment you’re talking as friends off the set, it makes it that much better when you’re filming.

I’ve been fortunate. I don’t pick scripts. Scripts pick me.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

When you’re coming up with new material, it’s not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it’s working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You’re constantly rebuilding.

To make headway, improve your head.

If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was ‚satisfactory,‘ I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?

Maturity is the ability to reap without apology and not complain when things don’t go well.