I used to play a lot of chess and competitive chess and study chess and as you get to the grandmasters and learn their styles when you start copying their games like the way they express themselves through... The way Kasparov or Bobby Fischer expresses themselves through a game of chess is it's astonishing. You can show a chess master one of their games and they'll say "Yeah, that is done by that player."

I really like the stuff that is very absurd and very real at the same time. I think Anton Chekhov is the greatest comedy writer of all time. I think he would make a great addition to The Office staff. If you look through Chekhov plays there is a lot of awkward pauses in there. His mixture of pathos, absurdity, truthfulness and whimsy is just mixed together perfectly.

A lot of actors are just like la la la - they're never really connected and then they're in the scene and then boom. They're looking you in the eyes and they're just really focused.

I am all for controlling guns.

[Internet] technology, like anything else that mankind creates is a tool and that tool can be used for good or for evil, like a light saber. Technology is supposed to bring people together, streamline things and make life easier and in a lot of ways it does that. However, technology can also disconnect you from other people and break down the social network, the real social network of family and friends and interpersonal communication, and isolate people, make them feel alone, make them feel small. So it's a tool that needs to be used correctly.

I have an eight-year-old child, and I literally can't wrap my mind around the kind of grief that must be felt when you lose a child.

I was doing great plays. It wasn't changing the world. I was getting good agents and doing film and TV and I wasn't happier. I was like "Wow, there is an unease inside of me." And that led me back on my kind of more spiritual path to the Baha'i faith in a new and fresher way and I came to also understand at that point that there was no difference between being devout and being an artist. There is no difference between creativity and spirituality and philosophy and that is what Soul Pancake, the book, and SoulPancake.com are about is: it's all about human expression and it's about seeking to transcend.