Take every job. Learn everybody's name. Show up early. Know who you are and know who you're not. Stop dreaming and start trying.

The live audience is a blind date. The camera is a hungry lover. One wants to be wined and dined and seduced and then decide where the evening will go. The other knows how it wants to be touched, wants it now and can damn well tell if you are lying about it. Both are fickle. Both feel good. Depends on your mood.

Ask questions. Listen. Be quiet. Be willing to make a fool of yourself. Be willing to be completely exposed and to give all you've got and to be rejected for your troubles. But expect magic to happen. It just might. And don't worry about winning the audition, just win the room.

I want to be Lon Chaney. I want to be Karloff. I want to help people escape the mundane world. I want to make their skins crawl. And I want them to love it every bit as much as I do.

If someone asked for advice on being an actor I'd say "Don't. It's a hard life." And if they walked away I'd be happy to have spared them years of misery.

Abraham Lincoln is resolute, honest, has the best interest of the nation at heart, and he's as ugly as homemade Sunday sin, so he is modest, too. I'd vote for that in an undead heartbeat.

The fact that Abraham Lincoln ever, ever became President is either a freak accident of history... or destiny; God's providence to America.