I try to stay away from the craft services table on set! That's probably why I am able to still get work in this business: I stay away from junk food.

I'm certainly grateful that there were projects that I did that people responded to. It would be a nightmare if it were the other way around. But it's sometimes a little disheartening.

I can be going through nothing, but within me, in my head, oh my God! It can be a circus.

My father was an actor, and my mother was his agent, so I had it on both sides: the crazy actor and his representation.

The first job I had was a Pampers commercial. And I used to go with my father whenever he would do a performance. I remember clinging to his legs, saying, 'Please. Take me with you.'

Success can be a very difficult thing to deal with.

I'm not a great card player. Keeping my cards close has always been a challenge for me.

It's always a leap of faith when you get involved with somebody.

When you sign onto something, you want the character to be redeemable and likeable, hopefully, and understandable.

I lost myself, and a lot of characters I played, I have latched onto some of their identities just because I was so lacking in anything of my own.

I had such a lack of respect for women that I just treated them as a hobby, trying to live up to the supposed image of Jack Nicholson and all those guys who were womanizers.

Sometimes you can tell a wise person not only by what he says but also by what he doesn't say. Remember, it is much better to say little than to say too much and regret it later.

One of the most beautiful ways for spiritual formation to take place is to let your insecurity lead you closer to the Lord. Natural hypersensitivity can become an asset; it makes you aware of your need to be with people and it allows you to be more willing to look at their needs.

Perhaps nothing helps us make the movement from our little selves to a larger world than remembering God in gratitude. Such a perspective puts God in view in all of life, not just in the moments we set aside for worship or spiritual disciplines. Not just in the moments when life seems easy.

The spiritual life is not a life before, after, or beyond our everyday existence. No, the spiritual life can only be real when it is lived in the midst of the pains and joys of the here and now.

Spiritual identity means we are not what we do or what people say about us. And we are not what we have. We are the beloved daughters and sons of God.

Friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey.

Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on.

I have an increasing sense that the most important crisis of our time is spiritual and that we need places where people can grow stronger in the spirit and be able to integrate the emotional struggles in their spiritual journeys.

It is not that the university as such is against spiritual formation. It is just that often the university does not know how to integrate spiritual formation within its academic disciplines.

Although I am a committed Catholic priest, and nowhere hide that fact, my focus is very much a spiritual journey.

I still believe that the university is a place where people can develop their minds and learn skills, but also they can develop their personalities and their spiritual life.

Solitude is an essential element for the spiritual health of a child. If we only stimulate our children - keep them busy with endless stories with no space to be alone - that's not good.

One way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there.

The mystery of the spiritual life is that Jesus desires to meet us in the seclusion of our own heart, to make his love known to us there, to free us from our fears, and to make our own deepest self known to us Each time you let the love of God penetrate deeper into your heart it leads to a love of ourselves that enables us to give whole-hearted love to our fellow human beings. In the seclusion of our hearts we learn to know the hidden presence of God; and with that spiritual knowledge we can lead a loving life.

Discipline in the spiritual life is the concentrated effort to create the space and time where God can become our master and where we can respond freely to God's guidance.

Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another.

It's not easy to sit and trust that in solitude God will speak to you - not as a magical voice but that God will let you know something gradually over the years. And in that word from God you will find the inner place from which to live your life. Solitude is where spiritual ministry begins. That's where Jesus listened to God. That's where we listen to God.

To receive spiritual direction is to recognize that God does not solve our problems or answer all our questions, but leads us closer to the mystery of our existence where all questions cease.

Gratitude goes beyond the 'mine' and 'thine' and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

It is precisely in times of spiritual dryness that we must hold on to our spiritual discipline so that we can grow into new intimacy with God.

Without Pentecost the Christ-event - the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus - remains imprisoned in history as something to remember, think about and reflect on. The Spirit of Jesus comes to dwell within us, so that we can become living Christs here and now.

Each individual human being can claim the Spirit of Jesus as the guiding spirit of his or her life. In that Spirit we can speak and act freely and confidently with the knowledge that the same Spirit that inspired Jesus is inspiring us.

Jesus invites us to abide in his love. That means to dwell with all that I am in him. It is an invitation to a total belonging, to full intimacy, to an unlimited being-with. The light of the Spirit reveals to us that love conquers all fear.

The spiritual life is a reaching out to our innermost self, to our fellow human and to our God.

The great spiritual task facing me is to so fully trust that I belong to God that I can be free in the world--free to speak even when my words are not received; free to act even when my actions are criticized, ridiculed, or considered useless.... I am convinced that I will truly be able to love the world when I fully believe that I am loved far beyond its boundaries.

In a strange way the spiritual life isn't "useful" or "successful." But it is meant to be fruitful. And fruitfulness comes out of brokenness.

For me the university has always been an ideal context for spiritual formation. I always felt that if you want to offer spiritual formation at the university, you can.

Joy is hidden in sorrow and sorrow in joy. If we try to avoid sorrow at all costs, we may never taste joy, and if we are suspicious of ecstasy, agony can never reach us either. Joy and sorrow are the parents of our spiritual growth.

a spiritual life without prayer is like the gospel without Christ.

Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome the world.

Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. ...We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.

I am beginning now to see how radically the character of my spiritual journey will change when I no longer think of God as hiding out and making it as difficult as possible for me to find him, but instead as the one who is looking for me while I am doing the hiding...

All the great spiritual leaders in history were people of hope. Abraham, Moses, Ruth, Mary, Jesus, Rumi, Gandhi, and Dorothy Day all lived with a promise in their hearts that guided them toward the future without the need to know exactly what it would look like. Let's live with hope.

Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved.

Spiritual maturity is not knowing what to do with your whole life, but just knowing what to do next.

As we read spiritually about spiritual things, we open our hearts to God's voice. Sometimes we must be willing to put down the book we are reading and just listen to what God is saying to us through our words.

If you feel a great loneliness and a deep longing for human contact, you have to be extremely discerning...and ask yourself whether this situation is truly God given. Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain. To live a disciplined life is to live in such a way that you want only to be where God is with you. The more deeply you live your spiritual life, the easier it will be to discern the difference between living with God and living without God, and the easier it will be to move away from the places where God is no longer with you.

I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved". Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.