I have driven school buses, sold egg rolls and painted houses, and I have often wondered what my life would have been like if I hadn't gone into acting. Mind you, it's a great life, going around pretending you're other people and getting paid ridiculous sums of money for it.

People get up, they go to work, they have their lives, but you'll never see the headlines say, 'Six billion people got along rather well today.' You'll have the headline about the 30 people who shot each other.

I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that - the ghosts you chase you never catch.

I'm not a Method actor. I don't believe acting should be psychodrama. I look within myself and see what I can find to play the role with. If I'm playing a blind man, I don't go around blindfolded for days. A lot of good actors would, but I don't go in for that very much. I like to just make it up as I go along.

I like design, I like details, to me it is just another form of self-expression.

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

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 gave up shame a long time ago.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Comedy is very, very hard to achieve.

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.