For me, if the words are good on the page, the rest of it comes from spending some time with the script, and not like you're learning lines but absorbing what the script has to offer.

Sometimes I read a really good script, and I just know that it's not a good fit.

I read a very romantic book when I was young, when I was in college: Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet.' And I've always felt that if you are in any kind of an artistic, creative endeavor, and you feel there's something else you can do for a living and be happy, I think you should do something else.

There's another film - a little Greek movie - that hopefully is going to get some distribution here in the U.S., called 'Worlds Apart,' where I also play a 60-year-old guy who looks a lot like J.K. Simmons, who has a romantic relationship with an appropriate woman.

On 'Oz' one day, I got a chunk of a camera embedded in my head, and I was passed out on the floor geysering blood while the set medic stood over me, freaking out. No help whatsoever. I ended up going to the ER and getting nine stitches in my head - real Frankenstein stitches.

By the time I started doing TV and film, I was in my forties, so I wasn't going to do the young up-and-comer.

We're raising a generation of kids who are being overly praised for incredibly minor accomplishments. I think it's counter-productive.

I've always believed, maybe naively, that 'The play's the thing.'

I've been your yellow M&M for, oh, at least two decades or so, and I've done a lot of other animated stuff in between.

If you're doing a prison show, HBO is the absolute best place in the world to be doing that because you're not going to have to do all that, you know, 'Prison Break' stuff where you can't really behave and speak like people do in a maximum-security prison.

I want to be like Bradley Cooper when I grow up.

If the awards buzz is happening, and it's coming from critics and people in the business and all of that, that's only more good news.

My overall quest is always to do something that's somehow different from whatever it is that I just got done doing. If that can include occasionally playing an older guy who has a romantic side and a romantic relationship, than that's a real treat.

I went from being a jock to a hippie. It was a very clear-cut decision. I had to be one or the other. I had to forsake that other aspect of myself. Or thought that I had to, which is regrettable. Quickly, I was back in the pine trees with the hippies, listening to my Jimi Hendrix and my Janis Joplin and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.

Maybe when my kids are grown up, I can go back to Broadway. It would be great someday, I suppose.

Fortunately, for the first 20 years in my career, I didn't have any other responsibilities outside of myself. I didn't have a wife and kids, so I could afford to sort of barely scrape by, to do theater.

Whether you need to like a character, I don't think that's necessary in order to portray him.

I would like to thank the 49 actors who appear on screen in 'Whiplash' for realizing Damien Chazelle's vision so beautifully.

I actually have a degree in music and was aware that music was a tool used in therapy. I didn't realize how far it had come since I was in college in the mid-seventies.

When we were shooting 'Oz,' my wife was doing 'Beauty and the Beast' on Broadway, singing and dancing. It was an interesting dichotomy in our house.

I wasn't a comic book aficionado at all when I was a kid, but my cousin Weed was. Every time we went to visit him on the farm, he had two really fun things: comedy albums and comic books.

I'm just glad to be able to work.

I started out as a singer and a musician, and I was taught that your job is just to get out of the way of Brahms or Arthur Miller or Shakespeare and convey the brilliance that they created.

People evolve and it's important to not stop evolving just because you've reached 'adulthood.'