All you really have when you're acting is the confidence and your ability to manage and tell a story by creating a character.

I wish I could say that when I didn't agree with a director I defer to him, but I think sometimes I'm a little self-righteous.

You have to let go of stuff when you act for a while. You stay too attached to things that have worked or haven't worked, it kind of makes it harder for you to move forward. So I try to concentrate on the experience that I have and then let the public expression of it be its own deal.

My limits are limitless. I find my limits every time I act.

Every time I do a movie, I think it's going to be a huge hit.

I have never indulged our society's misguided notion that my personal life is relevant to my work, so any reporting surrounding that is necessarily hearsay, speculation or fantasy.

I feel the film companies should pay for proper advertising to see that the movie will sell, instead of putting it on our backs.

Interest in certain themes doesn't mandate a personal stake or personal experience of those themes. I've killed people in plays, but no one asks me what it's like to kill people.

I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.

I don't want to expose the intricacies of my work so people can understand how I did it.

One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.

When somebody on a professional scale says you did it wrong, it has a pretty intense impact. If you don't have some kind of opposing force to say, that's all right, that's their opinion, or, I may have screwed that one up but I'll do better the next time, then you're screwed.

I wish I had more of the hero gene, but I don't think I'd be very good at playing one.