There's something melancholy about professors because they're chronically abandoned. They form these lovely relationships with students and then the students leave and the professors stay the same. It's like they're chronically abandoned.

There's that great Bill Hicks line - the comedian - where he says, "Are you proud to be an American?" "I don't know. It's just where my parents had sex."

You know, I’m not saying, “Oh, because I play a good guy on TV, I need to suddenly be villainous in a movie.” I look at it more like: does this role has a kind of urgency for me in terms of, “can I not say no to it for whatever reason?”

One man's uplift is another man's sentimental hooey.

We're like a gardener with a hose and our attention is water - we can water flowers or we can water weeds.

Here's the problem: I don't like who I've become when my iPhone is within reach. I find myself checking e-mails and responding to texts throughout the day with some kind of Pavlovian ferocity - it's not a conscious act, but a reflexive one.

It's not our job to play judge and jury, to determine who is worthy of our kindness and who is not. We just need to be kind, unconditionally and without ulterior motive, even - or rather, especially - when we'd prefer not to be.