My work has always been important to me. The reason I continue to do it is because it's so much fun for me. I love my work and so that's what keeps me in the game.

I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences.

Baseball was a metaphor for America, both here and in terms of how it was understood by the rest of the world.

When I was a carpenter, I once worked with this Russian lady architect. I would tell her, ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I want to change that a half inch,’ and she would say, ‘No limit for better.’ I think that is a worthy credo. You keep on going until you get it as close to being right as the time and patience of others will allow.

My occupation is assistant storyteller. It is not "icon."

Romantic love is one of the most exciting and fulfilling kinds of love and I think there is potential for it at any stage of your life.

There comes a point when you've exhausted your opportunities playing good guys. I've been around long enough, I think I'm entitled to explore a bit. But what I saw there was an opportunity to play a character different from what the audience's expectation was. A chance to take their crude experience of me - of my iconography, if you will - and turn it on its ear at an appropriate juncture in the film to be useful to the process of telling the story.