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. But you can go from acting to being a TV personality to being a radio personality to being a writer to being a producer, to just being a visionary, to voiceover work.

A lot of artists fail when they try to act, and they flop. So when I get into acting, it’s going to be to do it well, something good, something of quality. I want people to say, ‚Wow, that movie‘ – or that show or whatever – ‚turned out really well.‘

I like to hide behind the characters I play. Despite the public perception, I am a very private person who has a hard time with the fame thing.

I will not play just an evil part. In fact, I got offered $7 million several years ago to play the part that Faye Dunaway played in ‚Supergirl.‘ I was kind of insulted. I was impressed with the money, but I said, ‚Why are you asking me to play an evil witch? Do I come across as an evil witch to you?‘

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

I want to play a fireman and a spy. I want to learn special effects.

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

I thought I would be a guy on the radio.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

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

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.

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

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.

I can’t act!

I enjoy acting when you really hit it right.

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.

Playing big, heroic characters with heart is always a lot of fun. I enjoy making movies like that, and a lot of people love to live vicariously through those characters.

An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

The writer must be a participant in the scene… like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.

I was ashamed to admit I was hipped to the idea of acting. That’s why I started in with the props.

Acting is happy agony.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

For me, it’s a purity thing about the joke itself. It’s a test of a joke whether or not you do it completely clean and it works. If it does, then that’s a legitimate item you have there. For me, it’s nothing to do with finding those words offensive. It’s just not what I’m in search of. Do it clean, and you are really earning that laugh.

One good thing about acting in film is that it’s good therapy.

I once wanted to prove myself by being a great actress. Now I want to prove that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll be a great actress.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.

I don’t go around thinking I’m Ray Bradbury all the time.

I don’t have a vast longing for the stage.

In every movie I do have a dialogue.

Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it’s my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

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

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!

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn’t love them.

Stand-up is hard.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

I’ve done auditions where the casting director is taking the paper out of my hand in the middle of reading.

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.

‚Via Dolorosa‘ is the only thing I have ever acted in my life, professionally, and I’ll never act again.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

I was acting when I was playing baseball.

Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.

I didn’t want to be selling insurance at 40, wondering what would it have been like to do stand-up.

I learned from the guys before me – Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, just to name a few. These are guys that let it all hang out. What they lived is what they took to the stage.

I’m first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can’t say why I’m one.

I’m not a playwright.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

I like talking. I like acting.

Basically, I’m one of the greatest producers ever. And I’m also one of the greatest DJs ever. And I’m also one of the best executives ever.

Every time I try to retire, or even think of retiring from acting, my agent comes up with a script.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

I am not a consecutive writer.

‚Leading man‘ just means people want to see you and assume that you can hold a film, carry a movie.

If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I’m often accused of being ahead of my time, but it’s simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.

I did stand-up, weird and ignorant stuff about my career – anything for a laugh.