When you act, you're always playing a version of yourself. You can't bring more to the role than what you are

Infuse your life with action. Don't wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. Make your own hope. Make your own love. And whatever your beliefs, honor your creator, not by passively waiting for grace to come down from upon high, but by doing what you can to make grace happen... yourself, right now, right down here on Earth.

As an actor you always feel like you're swimming upstream.

My joke about Aaron Sorkin is that The West Wing was a great show about democracy, run by Kim Jong-Il!

You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don't necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction.

I used to defend the West Wing show from the charge of sentimentality or wish-fulfilment, because I think if you do go into the Barack Obama White House you will find six or seven people around him who are true believers. We make these people climb this filthy rope and then we stand at the bottom and say, "Hey, your hands are dirty!" To show heroic, progressive, democratic politics at work was more than I ever expected.

Early on in my career I got a part in Revenge Of The Nerds II: Nerds In Paradise. If I hadn't done that I wouldn't have met Tim Busfield and if I hadn't met Tim Busfield, I wouldn't have met Aaron Sorkin. So Nerds II took me straight to the White House!