There's a genetic memory that stays on your bones. What you experience when you're young, I think it stays with you.

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 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?

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

If you go to the real West Wing in the White House it looks like a boring law office; there's really not a whole lot going on in series. The moulding is frayed, the carpet is a little dirty; it's not exciting.

Families are like puzzles. They fit together in a certain way, and if one piece is missing, it throws everything off.

The political nonsense of network television and the culture of a set and all the problems that that can create, I can take. I can't take betraying the truth of what I'm doing. It cuts to the absolute core of everything that I do in the craft, in this world that I live in.