Most people don't know how underpaid and often ill-equipped urban fire departments are across North America.

Anybody who's done standup will tell you that there's nothing like it. The show starts at 8:00, the curtain goes up and there's nobody else except you and the audience, and you just perform for them for two hours. Nobody yells, 'Cut!' There are no retakes. That is still the most exciting medium for me, and I love it.

When I become president, all you assholes that ride bikes in the city? Lock and load! You're going down!

Most people think, "Life sucks, and then you die." I disagree. I think life sucks. Then you get cancer. Then you go into chemotherapy. You lose all your hair, you feel bad about yourself. Then all of the sudden the cancer goes into remission, and then all of the sudden you have a stroke. You can't move your right side. And then, maybe, you die.

You really want to have a back-up plan, so when you don't feel like acting, or you're getting older and settling down, you can produce your own stuff. So that's when I set about forming my own company and getting creative control.

There we were in the middle of a sexual revolution wearing clothes that guaranteed we wouldn't get laid.

We've always talked about doing something else and Campbell Scott is always busy and I'm always busy. But when we came up with the idea of doing the potato famine as a hip hop musical, I wanted somebody who was going to bring gravity.