My own life has in some ways been a decades-long tour of the sibling experience. I have full sibs, I have half-sibs, and for a time I had step-sibs.

My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later, blended home - and then watched that home explode, too.

Sisters have ways of socializing brothers into the mysteries of girls. Brothers have ways of socializing sisters into the puzzle that is boys.

We're learning how important it is both to preserve sibling relationships if they work and repair them if they're broken. We're also learning a lot about nonliteral siblings - stepsiblings, half-siblings - and the surprising power they can have.

There's a sort of sibling moratorium when you're establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled, siblings tend to regroup because now you're building a new extended family.

Some of the most rewarding times my brothers and I have are when all of us get together, and we can see what we've been building genetically and culturally.

Indeed, the best way to think of willpower is not as some shapeless behavioral trait but as a sort of psychic muscle, one that can atrophy or grow stronger depending on how it's used.

The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires - and gives rise to - deep feelings of faith.

Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts. They are our companions and our chattel, our family members and our laborers, our household pets and our household pests. We love them and cage them, admire them and abuse them. And, of course, we cook and eat them.

There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?

A close family member once offered his opinion that I exhibit the phone manners of a goat, then promptly withdrew the charge - out of fairness to goats.

As with real reading, the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a lot of experience. If you don't adequately acquire those skills, moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary.

You just put your head down and do the work.

I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a female transgender on television.

Usually when you act, you know where you're going, where the point is.

Owning a bookstore was right up there with acting in life goals, but other than swaggering around the store, I'm not much use.

My wife thought I was Vincent Schiavelli, and we married.

So many people say they went to school on 'The Larry Sanders Show.'

I think shows being sent out this way - pressing a button and 10 episodes can go out to the U.S.A., and the U.K. and Germany, it's very cool.

If you see 'Pollock,' I weighed almost 270 pounds.

I thought I was gonna do Lear, but I'm gonna do Maura.

I worked at The Old Globe Theater under the great baton of Craig Noel. One of the great theater heroes that we have. He was so great and so inspirational. I think I did 'Antony and Cleopatra' and 'The Taming of the Shrew'. I lived in Ocean Beach, and my rent was $140 a month.

I am a huge believer - I always have been - in the power of comedy. That comedy will break hatred and will bring understanding.

There was a library near us in San Francisco. It was the West Portal Public Library. I would ask my father to drive me there at night and pick me up when it closed. I think he was worried about this routine but never let on. Also, I kept this a secret from my friends, as I don't think it would have been considered the 'coolest' habit.

I think of everything as comedy, but I don't think of it in terms of sitcom comedy, I think of it in terms of Chekhov comedy. Chekhov called his plays comedies. There's always a mixture of a laugh with sadness. So the plie to the laugh is sadness.

You want to feel, 'I know that character.'

I did not know that you had to learn makeup. I just thought you went, 'Oh, I'm gonna put on some makeup.'

What's interesting about playing Maura is that I get to use more of Jeffrey that I've ever used in any role, and I think that's the remarkable part about it and truly the most surprising part about doing this role.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is part of our constitutional rights and it belongs to everybody.

I think most of my heroes are not the traditional types. A guy I was fascinated with was Buster Keaton. I just love what he did. I love that mug.

We have been treated gorgeously by Amazon.

The honor of being able to play Maura is transformative. I'm 70 years old. I should be in a reading room, reading Dickens or something.

I really got used to playing Maura.

The 'Hey now's' are delivered as people pass me. As I just get near ear range, I hear, 'Hey now!' and that's very funny.

I actually got thrown into my Bar Mitzvah because my teacher, my Cantor, did not tell me that they would all say 'amen' at the end of each, for want of a better word, paragraph. And that threw me completely. I almost went into an Ella Fitzgerald sort of scat.

I kind of like not knowing how to do something - it's more exciting.

This whole thing about winning and losing is muddy waters. But I can remember, as a young actor, just walking around this city and not being able to get arrested.

In Yiddish, we say, 'Nisht ahin un nisht aher.' It's neither here, it's neither there. I get more nerves than on anything I do when I'm doing multi-camera. But single-camera, I love very much.

I'm really aging myself, but I grew up with 'Playhouse 90' and the plays on the air - 90 minute plays.

I came to New York late; I was already past 30.

When I was a kid, we got up, we walked a number of paces to a television, turned it on, and changed channels.

I'm a Jewish son of Russian-Hungarian heritage parents. Humor was very important. My whole goal was to make my parents laugh. And my whole strategy as a young man was, if I could make them laugh, I could have enough time to figure out what to do next.

There was one television in the living room, and we all sat around on Sundays and watched Ed Sullivan.

The real road, to me, was within the actor, within myself, within my own personality. How much Jeffrey can I find, and how much of Jeffrey could I access? What parts of Jeffrey have I never used for Hank or for George or Oscar? - and that was a delight.

I learned the biggest lesson just watching Ed McMahon, watching him watch Mr. Carson's monologue.

When I did the pilot, Mort was very real to me. When I got through with the ten weeks, Maura is even more real to me.

I can't say enough about the guts and the talents of Amazon. They're so agile, they're so nimble; they picked us up two weeks after we premiered, and their whole attitude is, 'Go, go, go, go,' so I'm very, very impressed.

Every family has that secret. Every family has that thing where you go, 'Shhh, shhh, shhh.'

I've been in three sort of... I mean, I'd say they're groundbreaking series, if only because of the creators. One was 'Max Headroom', another was 'The Larry Sanders Show', and the third was 'Arrested Development'.

I think I made $55 a week, and it was bliss... I was doing theater. It was all I ever wanted to do. It was so much fun, and you got paid for it, and you met people, and it's the greatest education in the world. And in my little Greenbrier station wagon, I felt very much like a troubadour.