In high school, my goal was to be a writer for SNL, then I got into the acting.

I like the idea of capturing people who aren't there to save the world.

There's too much insecurity on studio sets, with all the people standing around, whispering.

I love anything to do with ventriloquism and magic.

As a young surgeon in training at the University of California San Francisco General Hospital in the early '80s, my colleagues and I were inundated with an epidemic of young men with fevers, rashes, swollen lymph nodes and eventually death.

Grief is a very strange thing. It can affect you in all kinds of ways. I lost a year. I’ve done a lot of therapy and it’s great to be back on the horse.

I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

Deem no man happy until he passes the end of his life without suffering grief.