Directors get to fire on many more cylinders than an actor.

Even when I was an actor in training, one criticism my teachers had was that I should think about directing instead of acting, because the best actors see the material they're working on through blinders. They can't see anything but their role. I could never really do that.

Do people absolutely need the arts to get by day-to-day? You can make that claim, but they also really need a lot of things before that.

When CNN does a story and then says, 'Tweet us what you think' - why? Why does it matter what I think? Why should my thoughts be broadcast on a national news program? It's enough for me to just sit and listen and learn.

Where are reliable journalism and reliable investigative voices going to come from? I love the days of old - the Walter Cronkites, the Dan Rathers.

I think that I have very few personal gifts to bring to real politics.

I do think that the days of gathering around a television set that functions merely as a television set, to receive a live broadcast of some networked programming, those days are probably numbered.

Every poker player, like every fisherman, needs to have a story in a box, and most poker stories are completely uninteresting.

One of the downsides of being a poker pro is that people see exactly how you play.

What is it about Iowa? I'm the shortest guy in the state.

I'm actually one of the more reluctant celebrities you will ever meet.

I started balding at age 17 and after first being sad, I really embraced it.

I'm not a director to make an action or horror film. That's not for me.

I was the teenage kid growing up in New Jersey watching the Tony Awards and thinking, 'Oh, maybe if I'm lucky I'll make it to Broadway by the time I'm 40!'

The world of the stage and the performance on the stage usually does not tend to translate very well - it doesn't tend to hold very well - once cameras are on it; it's not like it's terrible or embarrassing or bad anything, but, I, as an actor, would perform a role differently for an audience than I would for just cameras.

In New York, the theater is a destination point. In Los Angeles, no matter how provocative, how successful, how star-studded the theater event may be, it is, at best, a second-class citizen.

Theater is very much the world I'd like to get back to, particularly in New York, both as an actor and director.

It's a question of finding the right thing, if I'm going to be an actor... if I have to get up eight times a week for a number of months, I want to be excited and challenged from the day I start to the day I leave.

I have always wanted to play Sweeney in 'Sweeney Todd.'

The downside of being a celebrity is that people kind of know about you, and you really don't need them to know about you - you need them to know about your work.

Most stand-up comics relish performing 'in one' - solo. They like the autonomy.

I went into performing for the community. Being backstage with your company of fellows is the best part of working in live theater. That energy, that combined focus, the synergy - it's addictive.

Boston was a great town to go to college in. Maybe that's why there's so many colleges there. I love the town, and I loved Boston University.

I am hard-core middle class.

You need to find the size of performance that's appropriate to the material, appropriate to the shot, or appropriate to the scene.

Really, the golden egg of doing a series is that you cross that very stupid bridge that says 'Name Actors Only' in casting sessions. All of a sudden, you become a name actor; it gives you marquee value. That's all that a series does.

Television, in particular, doesn't look for talent; it looks for personas. You have a great persona? You can be a TV star.

Do you want to have a career that goes beyond, you know, 11 minutes in a 22-minute television show every week? Some people don't. That's fine.

Many people don't know our famous 'soup kitchen' episode on Seinfeld was inspired by an actual soup restaurant off 8th Avenue in New York.

I found that looking at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from an outside vantage point was actually quite distancing. The history of the conflict, the personalities, the violence, the distrust, and the seeming lack of viable solutions made meaningful involvement feel impossible. What changed that, for me, was changing the vantage point.

We see and hear about Israelis and Palestinians only when they are defined by the global media as 'occupiers,' 'terrorists,' and 'victims.' But we forget that they are fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and neighbors and doctors and shop-owners and farmers and students.