It took me forever, learning improvisation, because I had studied with Lee Strasberg - I dropped out of Chicago and went to his classes in New York for a couple of years, once or twice a week. What I didn't realize was I was learning directing because he wasn't all that good about acting, not for me.

You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.

It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.

I am a person who always tries not to be easily influenced by position or achievement. I thank God for the fact that I can share more kindness and a good quality of life through the popularity. Not for the popularity itself.

My own personal connection with God was not in a religious sense, so I wasn't really thinking in that way when I got the role and when I started doing it.

As you know, God is usually on the side of the big squadrons against the small.

It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.