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

Peter Sellers was just a brilliant actor, and also comedic.

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.

Everything in high school was reversed. If marijuana was supposed to make you mellow, I would be like, "The cops, the cops, the cops..." I was what you call the buzz kill.

Doing my first movie, I realized I could get into real bad habits. If you're the star, all you have to do is show up, and 20 people say, 'Do you want anything? What is it? Let me get it for you.' Believe me, you get spoiled very quickly. I saw some of my contemporaries allow themselves to have that fame, thinking they could handle it. It messed them up.

There are lots of actors who are awful people, but nobody talks about them being awful because they've made billions.

The trick to being a good actor is getting so involved in your character that the camera disappears, the 50 bored guys eating doughnuts disappear, friends disappear. To get to that point when you don't have to think about it, you're just acting and reacting in those circumstances.