I've always considered myself a character actor. That's the way I was trained, really.

In my early teen years, I wanted to become a vet. That was my plan. I worked as a veterinarian's assistant for a couple of summers.

I have a resistance to change in things that I feel comfortable with and that I'm used to.

When you break up, your whole identity is shattered. It's like death.

I really want to see the Cubs in the World Series. I really do.

I want to work with great people. Great people really make you better.

Surfing is like golf: You're always battling, and it keeps knocking you down. There are a lot of wipeouts. But when you stay with it and catch that wave, you really taste it. It's magic.

Everybody just wants to be famous first, and then maybe learn how to act.

God is the only way you're going to make it in life, the glue that holds everything together.

Certainly I'm a Christian first and foremost. But I do believe in religious tolerance and finding the commonality between all of us. I think that's how we're all going to come together.

I was made to be a perfectionist at everything I did. Everything was more important than what I wanted.

Thy heart had gone too far in this world, and think thou to comprehend the way of the most High?

Something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

Arguing is a game that two can play at. But it is a strange game in that neither opponent ever wins.

Before the group left, Gary asked for my phone number, and the next day he called to ask me to dinner that night. I had no idea he was married, but I found out that night.

Trying harder doesn’t work for me. Slowly I’ve learned to pray for God’s help and He has become my greatest love and desire.

I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful.

Speaking of River City in The Music Man & his home town, Mason City, Iowa: I didn't have to make up anything. I simply remembered Mason City as closely as I could.

The hapless wit has his labors always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.

That was my real education in the world - I learned politics, the social and cultural life of India, Hindu tradition and religion, and Buddhism.