If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.

It is a weird thing that actors have people applaud when they're done working. I still find that entertaining.

A lot of old guys in movies are like cowboys - they talk like cowboys and they dress like cowboys.

I'm going to put a museum on my ranch and people keep saying, "That's a huge idea." Yeah, it's big, but not bigger than the average big movie. A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything. That's maybe a big gallery's total sales for a given year.

A wonderful but kind of a terrible truth about acting is that you actually get to a point where you become content with an impossible task: it is really impossible to properly prepare. You kind of have to start over every time.

I love acting, and doing it well matters to me.

It was very serious and I wanted to do something really different so there was this comedy called TOP SECRET.