Sometimes you're not supposed to enjoy it [acting]. You're supposed to cooperate with misery and proceed anyway. But what I do enjoy is a sense of well-being and just participating in life and life's turns.

Sometimes everything you need to know to be an actor in your mid-forties, you learn before you were 15 years old.

I saw School of Rock, and I was like, why haven't I worked with Richard Linklater already? Then by the time I got him I was like, I'm really pissed off I feel like you owe me some retroactive swag. He gave me the 10-year anniversary "Dazed and Confused" T-shirt, which I still wear with relish.

I think it's miraculous that anybody survives themselves.

I would say that among my many huge emotional miscalculations was my taking a film career for granted. It is the most awesome privilege to be able to use one's imagination and wit, physicality and musicality, conscious brain and unconscious instinct in the service of a work that has a chance to move and excite and amuse and delight people all over the world, including long after we're dead. What a noble calling! And I felt it was just there for me as a kind of given, some sort of inherited birthright-when in reality it's the most magnificent luxury.

I don't drink these days. I am allergic to alcohol and narcotics. I break out in handcuffs.

I'm coming from a place of total strength and humility now.