The best you can hope for is a great collaborator.

I personally was driven to be an actor for the love of telling a story. It was very closely linked to being a reader as a kid and being transported by literature and art. It had nothing - zero - to do with anything resembling fame.

It's core to my beliefs now: Sometimes in being given a challenge, you're actually being given a real opportunity, and a lot of that is how you handle it. Do you feel sorry for yourself or do you think, All right! I'll see what I can make out of this? I've had that over and over. If I hang out in the disappointment, I'll just be disappointed all the time.

My biggest goal was - I thought, God, if I could just be a rep company member at the Arena Stage in Washington, D. C. and get to play a bunch of parts in a year! And now in my work everything is about promoting it. It's not about the doing of it! Everything is: You have to sell it, and they ask you to tweet about it or do photo shoots, even for the smallest job. There's an imbalance in terms of what is actually gratifying. The stuff that is gratifying is, like I said, the day of work and the doing of it.

I love TV. I think I'd do a half-hour single-camera comedy.

I'm nice, and I show up on time.

We're all working hard, but so far away from what we actually want to be doing. We're all peering in at the window of a party we aren't invited to yet, a party we wouldn't know how to dress for, or what kind of conversation to make, even if we came as someone's guest.