A lot of our young people are sleep-walking, dreaming that they're awake, and lots of aspects of society initially go about keeping it so.

Pretend and real are all real to a psychopath.

When you're playing a real character, you want to honor that person and receive inspiration from that person. They need to anoint you in some way that allows you to borrow just a small piece of their soul. That is the flame.

It is the ordinariness of us that is the same in all of us.

We actors are superstitious creatures. We do all the homework and we put all of the components together, but there's always one key aspect that we're not in charge of, really, and that's magic. You are always on the lookout for where and how that magic is going to ignite. When you have worked as much as I have and have sought it out as often as I do, you get very clear that it will come at very, very odd, unexpected moments.

You can't play history and you can't play historical characters. You just have to reduce it to the ordinary.

The ordinary is ultimately what moves us most deeply. It's what touches us, and it's what we most recognize, in great moments of art.