I was happy to spend time with my family, get to know my daughter, who was born during The West Wing. I missed her first words. I missed her first steps. I'd leave work before she woke up and got home after she was asleep and didn't really know her. So it was important for that reason to reintroduce myself to the family after all of that hard work.

Every role is challenging in its own way, but the most challenging roles are the ones that are badly written - then it's completely up to you to come up with something that is interesting to the story and myself as an actor.

We are often too late with our brilliance. We are on time delay. The only instant gratification comes in the form of potato chips. The rest will find us by surprise somewhere down the road maybe as we sleep and dream of other things.

I was doing a play out in L.A. 20-some-odd years ago called 'Goose and Tomtom' by David Rabe, and somebody saw it and the next thing I know I'm doing the table read of the film version of 'Glengarry Glen Ross' with Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon - one of the great films of our generation.

Surviving the grind of 18-hour days and getting up at four in the morning to work out for an hour so I'd have the energy to do it again the next day. I did not know I had that discipline. I did not know I had the discipline to learn a seven-page scene in three hours to shoot that day or the next day. I didn't know that I was capable of realizing that potential.

I would love to be in the position where the role is challenging enough that I need three months to prepare for it and then six months to live the life of character.

Playing a TV character for seven years is almost like when you do a play. You live, breathe, and everything else with that character 24-7 for six months or four months or whatever, and that gets very deep in your blood. When you do a TV character for seven years, that's a long time. It becomes a seminal era in your life.