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.

I am the Internet guy. But the reason the 'Onion News Empire' was such an easy decision to make is I so trust that side of the fence now.

I loved the gentlemanly way they treated each other. It was unlike anything I was used to. I started helping them strike the set and, at 11, began taking acting classes privately.

You see kids walking to the bus, and they're watching product on their phones. I'm positive that my grandkids and their grandkids are going to put on a pair of glasses and watch something.

There's a wonderful adage in acting that you're stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck with you.

You can send a lot of instruction through laughter.

My new toy is not knowing, because it's very creative. I'm the guy who likes to get in the car and get lost.

I love this company. I don't know how it was selected. It's a bunch of machers. They mean business.

The Emmy should be an ensemble award, too. I kept howling at everyone else's performances.

As my manager says, 'These are wonderful problems.'

My part had three lines. I said, 'You look wonderful, sir,' three times. All my friends said, 'Do not take that role - and do not understudy. You'll regret it the rest of your life.' I did both of those things, and I've never regretted it once.

And I'd watch George C. Scott from backstage. He was one of my mentors.

I remember going to Bob Preston's dressing room because I was losing a laugh - as you do in a long run. He said, 'Give me the script. That's where you're going off the road.' That's comedy. It's never the line itself; it's in the foundation.

My education was doing good plays and also stinkers. When you do a stinker, you learn how to act. I like having to audition. It's nice to do rehearsals. But it's with an audience that you get to love it!

When I was a young boy in San Francisco, I remember being sent home from playing with a friend, and I remember the mother saying, 'Tell Jeffrey to go home.' And I said to the girl, 'Why?' She goes, 'My mother says that you're the people who killed Christ.'

When I was growing up, there was a character on TV; there was a character stereotype: it was personified by Mel on 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.'

I was a young actor who was bald, but at that time, there was a thing on television that - there was a prototype or a stereotype of a principal who was bald and mean with glasses, or there was... the angry boss who was bald.

I can only speak for me... but in my life, I find that, in sobriety, I feel much more, and I have much more depth. I also feel - not to segue, but as being a parent of five kids, I can bring much more to my acting, and so I'm all about anything that gives you more feeling and more depth.

I think I have femininity, I have masculinity, but I get to use all of Jeffrey, and that's very powerful. And this is what I always thought when I went down in my little basement in San Francisco, where I grew up, and daydreamed about being an actor: It felt like this. This is what it felt like.

I grew up in San Fransisco in a very liberal community. My environment was very, very open and very liberal.

We did a thing that we would call we call 'hirstories.' H - I - R - S - T - O - R - Y. I would enact a young Mort. And that always felt - it was so funny - it felt more difficult than playing Maura.

'Clocked' means someone sees you for being transgender.

I don't take off my nail polish when I go home because I'm too lazy, and they're fine with it. Maybe the checkout at the grocery store's not so great with it, but they're fine with it. The distrust, the phobias, those are learned, those are taught. But the natural grace is to understand and to love.

George Saunders's 'Lincoln in the Bardo' is a hands-down masterpiece - the subject of Abraham Lincoln and the genius of this author is a perfect union.

It was the '50s, and the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System were in fashion. I hung out in the 812 section - American theater and plays. This is where I first read Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' and was transfixed. I remember staring into space for what seemed an eternity after reading Linda Loman's final speech.

I've done 'Yo Gabba Gabba!' I've done... oh, it's not called 'Rapunzel' anymore. 'Tangled', that's it. Those are both huge.

To you people out there, you producers and you network owners and you agents and you creative sparks, please give transgender talent a chance. Give them auditions. Give them their story. Do that.

I almost should have a shirt made: 'Jill Soloway has changed my life...' Not only changed my life with the opportunity to play Maura, but the opportunity and the responsibility of playing Maura.