Listen - I like musicals. Even when they're bad, there's a couple of dancers I can watch.

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.

I still have the mentality of someone who doesn't know where he's going to sleep and doesn't know if he has enough money for gas to get to the next job interview. I don't think that mentality ever leaves, you know?

I am one of the lucky ones; believe me, I haven't forgotten that.

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.

I fell in love with my wife twenty years ago. I am only now, it seems, getting it through my very thick skull how lucky I am.

I didn't expect NBC would be at all thrilled about me, because the year before the West Wing I had rejected a pilot at the last minute and got them very upset. I ended up not coming to the casting - in fact it happened four different times because I just wasn't convinced that I wanted to do television.