Don't listen to what anybody says except the people who encourage you. If it's what you want to do and it's within yourself, then keep going and try to do it for the rest of your life.

When I was 19, I thought [Brokeback Mountain] was going to be the best movie ever made. And everyone was going to see it and it was just going to be incredible. And then nobody saw it and it didn't get bought at Sundance. And it was a really great experience. Humbling. And then it's since found its way.

I love storytelling, you know, beyond anything. I love a great story beyond a great performance. Storytelling is about what we all do together and how we collaborate together. A performance can be a collaboration in ways, but oftentimes it's one individual thing.

On a spiritual level, on a place where you want to be a better human being and listen more, I try. I joke, but it has. I mean, I don't consider myself a card-carrying Buddhist, you know. But I do believe deeply in the ideas, and I think anytime you have interest in anything, it somehow humbles you.

It's daunting trying to do any service as an American to such a beautiful, fluid speech pattern that you [British] all have. We are just barbarians in comparison.

I think that we all have within us the potential for almost anything. If we play close attention to our lives, then we can get at it somehow.

As Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor. My sister [Maggie Gyllenhaal] came up to me recently after she saw this movie, Southpaw, the movie I did, and she thought there was this exploration of that type of presentation, and a bit of representation as well, if I could be totally honest, where she was deeply moved.