We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.

When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater.

I'm probably a better granddad than dad because your role as a grandfather is to be fun, and I'm fun.

I owe my whole career as a storyteller to my father. He was an actor/director/producer and teacher.

When I was a teenager, I remember the extraordinary feeling of accomplishment for completing 'Vanity Fair.' I don't think it was even for school.

My sense of myself is that I'm a character actor, and character actors are ready, willing, and able to do anything, to be totally different from themselves. That's my job, to be ready. I'm some kind of first responder.

I work very hard on motivating everything I do as an actor. Explosive moments have to be completely motivated; whether they're explosive comedy or explosive horror, they have to come organically out of a scene and an interaction with another actor.

I eat way too fast.

The Wodehouse language is so rich and detailed and hilarious.

I was married very young. I lived a very middle class life. I was married at age 21, divorced at 31.

I'm a lazy actor, lazier than you would think. I don't usually do a lot of research.

Actors are not necessarily smart people.

There's nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night.

I'd sleep under a Vermeer.

If a film is about love, it tends to be about tortured love or discovering love or young love. It's not this wonderful kind of comfortable, old resilient love.

One of the things you learn as an actor is that human beings are capable of almost anything. I'm sort of in the business of illustrating that fact.

I'm a very hopeful person. I mean, I'm an optimistic person, sometimes stupidly optimistic.

In TV and movies, you get known for a certain thing, and that's what's expected. Onstage, people are more open to whatever character you create from one play to the next.

Grown adults often tell me that they used to sit, as children with their parents, and watch '3rd Rock from the Sun,' and they would all enjoy it for completely different reasons. I think that's part of the magic of the show.

The way I approach acting when there's a real life character, it's sort of like a Venn diagram. What I come up with is some amalgam of the two of us.

I tell young people, including my own kids, don't do this, it's too difficult. It's a career full of rejection, disappointment and failure. It's murderously hard on the ego. Don't become an actor.

I'm a very slow and ponderous reader, but I'm dogged.

I am such a coward when it comes to political arguments. I tend to sort of recoil rather than engage.

My hairline is receding. So my days as a romantic lead - even though I've never had them - are behind me.

Will Ferrell is my new favorite person in the business. He's a completely adorable man.

The zombie is the new, sort of, archetype of our times.

It's wonderful to play a villain who gets a laugh or to stop a comedy dead in its tracks with a touching moment. It's kind of like a symphony that has very different movements.

I loved playing Roberta Muldoon!

Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.

I've said no to a lot of things I'd like to have done. My agent has never seen anything like it.

I like to rehearse and rehearse and have everything exactly calculated before we start shooting - probably to a fault.

I got to have a great big knock-down, drag-out fight with Sylvester Stallone. Every actor should have that much fun at some point. You can hit him as hard as you can, and it's never enough for him.

Comedy is very, very hard to achieve.

I'm as vain as the next person, but I've made so much fun of myself over the years, and that's very salutary as you grow older.

People have expectations from you - and the whole fun of acting is taking expectations and completely upending them. That's how you get laughs in comedy, and that's how you scare the daylights out of people in a horror film.

Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.

If I don't enjoy it, there's something seriously wrong. There's a reason why they call it playing, what we do. It's ecstatic fun, and I overdo it - I mean, I can't seem to stop - people ask me to act, and I say yes.

There's no more private family than the royal family. People who can really only be themselves with each other. The rest of us just spend all our time fascinated by them.

If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.

We all have our secrets, and we all have our deceptions. Acting, at its best, is all about deceiving people, and this makes it all the more interesting to us.

Every time I see somebody behaving truly insanely in real life, I think, 'Yes! I'm not over the top after all!'

For me, working on stage is much more exhausting than all the other mediums, but it's also much more thrilling.

In animation, there's this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT'S what I was doing.

Other people have often had more faith in me than I had in myself - I never thought I could pull off Roberta Muldoon in 'The World According to Garp,' or 'Of Mice and Men's' Lennie as one of my first acting jobs.

I love New York. I lived there all through the '70s and have lived in L.A. since the early '80s but come back all the time to do theater.

I'm a fun father, but not a good father. The hard decisions always went to my wife.

It's pretty rare that I see a film that I did a long, long time ago.

I gave up shame a long time ago.

I can't imagine doing an hour-long dramatic series because it's so much work. A sitcom is a wonderful gig. You work from 10 to 4 every day, it's fun, and you get to live at home.

I consider myself a very lucky actor that, approaching 60, I'm still employed and employable.