Quotes

Personnal
“The power a teacher has to influence someone is so great. I can’t think of a profession I have more respect for.”

“Losing both parents at a young age gave me a sense that you can’t really control life—so you’d better live it while it’s here. I stopped believing in a storybook existence a long time ago. All you can do is push in a direction and see what comes of it.”

“Jen and I were in Italy this year?and we were looking at Michelangelo’s sculpture of David when we noticed people staring at us and talking about Mad Men. I thought, ‘People, there’s a great work of art here, and it’s the other way.’”

“I was forced to grow up very early because I lost my mother when I was 10. So that tends to take a lot of childhood out of the equation and you become very aware of adult things.”

“I like shooting guns, but killing shit wasn’t for me. Seeing a deer get trussed from the rafters of a garage was a little visceral, to say the least.”

“Growing up, the bowling alley had a pretty sick arcade. I was a Donkey Kong guy, big time. But I’d play anything. I still go. If I walk by an arcade, I’ll walk in just to see what’s new.”

“Though I loved my dad and I would see him every other weekend. It wasn’t like he was a guy I didn’t know. He had not remarried, but he had two children from a previous marriage, one of whom was living with him, as well as my 80-year-old grandmother.”

“I lived with my father from then on, but we had several issues and problems to the point where I spent most of my time sponging food from my friends’ families and sleeping in their basements.”

“You deal with it the best you can although obviously you’re not equipped to really deal with it. I denied it for as long as I could, and it all came out 10 years later in terrible behavior and acting out. It was a traumatic thing to happen. It’s your mother, and mothers should be around for awhile. If I ever see a movie with a dying mom, I’m on the floor. I can’t do Terms of Endearment (1983) – I’ll be a wreck for a week.”

“Theater departments are usually a big collection of orphans and screwups—sort of lost tribes—and I found kinship there.”

“If you can learn to fail, then you can probably get to where you want to be.”

“I’m not a cheater. I’ve never cheated in my life.”

“‘It was a crazy house and it was so cheap even I could afford it. An 85-year-old woman owned the house. She was a soap actress who lived in New York and we were four guys, my size and bigger. But we broke so many pieces of furniture, these little-old-lady chairs you would sit on and they would crack. Plus we would have parties and the keg would leak. It was my job as the diplomat of the group to say to her, “Marilyn, we love you” and make her feel good. I was always the one who was behind on the rent. I was very proud that once I started working I was able to pay her back completely.”

“I’ve gotten away with a lot in my life. The older you get the more you realise you’re not getting away with it, it’s taking its toll somewhere. So you try not to put yourself in those situations. Part of the mysterious process called growing up. Some people do that better than others. ”

“I’ve always been a fan of advertising, I’ve always been a fan of television, I’ve loved commercials, I’ve loved all the jingles, I loved all the stuff.”

“I think kids now, their detectors are much more fine-tuned than the people in my generation or even older, because we’re just, I think, sort of accustomed – if it’s in print, you kind of believe it.”

“There are a lot of stories about your parents that sometimes you just don’t get when you’re a little kid – like philandering or maybe not being the best person. And you think, yeesh! We all have impressions of people in our lives, political leaders or father figures, where you think, ‘They always had our best interests in mind.’ Very often that’s not the case – it’s the opposite, they had their best interests in mind.”

“For a kid who’s lost his mom and all the rage and grief that no one was able to talk out of me, football was a very therapeutic sport. Very.”

“I remember opening my dad’s closet and there were, like, 40 suits, every color of the rainbow, plaid and winter and summer. He had two jewelry boxes full of watches and lighters and cuff links. And just…he was that guy. He was probably unfulfilled in his life in many ways.”

“Where you come from is not necessarily as important as where you are.”

“If you’re worried about something like, say, hair in your food, it ain’t the hair that’s going to kill you – it’s the worry.”

“I don’t necessarily want kids. A lot of our friends are having children and I don’t know if it’s for me. I haven’t come down hardcore on either side of the argument. I think when people come from a stable family having children becomes a celebration and I’m not sure it would be that way for me. ”

“I was raised by a single mother and I’ve been in a 10-year relationship with my girlfriend. My whole life I’ve been surrounded by women. ”

“I just decided I’d stop shaving and this is the result: a beard.”

“I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and I was born with a very profound sense of politeness. When you look at the current culture and the way women are treated versus how they were treated in the early sixties – the objectification of women, I think, is in many ways much worse now than it was then. At the end of the day, you treated women like that because that was somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife, somebody’s daughter, and there was a level of respect. I think that’s a little bit gone by the wayside, and it is a shame.”

“I can tell you right now that if my dog ever disappeared, it would be a life-long obsession of trying to find out what happened.”

“Billy Madison,” Adam Sandler’s movie, when he’s talking about how he lost a dog, he’s like, “You gotta get out there and FIND THAT DOG!” You literally need to drop everything. It’s a tortured analogy, almost infantile in its ridiculousness, but that’s how I feel about my dog.”

“There are a lot of options to take in your life and not be wasteful and selfish. If you put other people and the environment first instead of yourself, it’s a lot easier to make those decisions that decrease your impact on the environment. We don’t use a lot of air-conditioning. We open windows. We have a relatively small air-conditioning bill, and we’re trying to get it smaller every day. The fact that we’re in California and there have been a lot of initiatives put forth to do that is great. We’re trying to take advantage of that as much as we can.”

“I can’t stand being in a gym. It makes me crazy. I like competitive sports like tennis or pickup basketball.”

“I tend to see myself as a 9-year-old boy, which can be surprising – I don’t think I had wrinkles when I was 9.”

Jennifer Westfeldt
“She didn’t get the part, which may be my fault, but she got the guy.”

“I don’t have the marriage chip, and neither of us have the greatest examples of marriages in our families. But Jen is the love of my life, and we’ve already been together four times longer than my parents were married.”

“I have a pretty stable relationship that brings me love and happiness and comfort. I have a great house and a great dog.”

“We met through some mutual friends at somebody’s birthday party. We didn’t really hit it off immediately. She thought I was a cocky asshole.”

“Oh, we don’t want to rush into anything. We have plenty of surrogate kids. In fact, Sarah Clarke, a friend of mine from way back in St. Louis, just had her first baby, and she lives a few blocks from us. And of course we have our dog.”

“I have a lady, she’s a great lady. I love her a lot, she loves me. We’re on the same page. Whenever that day happens when we’re not on the same page we’ll move forward with it. We’re interested in having our lives be our lives right now and not a third person’s vis-à-vis marriage and whatever that means. ”

“It couldn’t be a simpler answer. Marriage doesn’t really mean anything to me. I feel like in many ways marriage is more for the families [of the couple] than for the people involved, so I don’t gravitate to it. But I’ve also said that the minute that Jen is like, ‘You need to marry me,’ I’ll be like, ‘All right!’ We are both on the same page.”

“She’s just the most beautiful, intelligent woman I’ve ever met.”

“I’ve lived on couches, in friends’ basements. The idea of having any place of my own is really remarkable. I get really warm and happy and, like, Oh my God, I can’t believe that this is our place. Jen and I had a moment like that last night—we were sitting in front of the fireplace with our dog, and I was like, How nice is this? How nice is this? And the answer is: very.”

“We just click. We may not have a piece of paper that says we’re husband and wife, but after 10 years, Jennifer is more than just a girlfriend. What we have is much deeper and we both know that.”

“Love exists outside of government, so that’s how Jen and I have our relationship. We discuss it all the time; we’re like, “We’re totally in love with each other, so why would we want to change the rules of that, if in fact that would?” Then, of course, you get into the practicalities of it, like, “What if you get sick and I can’t visit you in the hospital?” or “What if you die and all your stuff goes to the state?” You’re like, “Well, that makes sense. Shit, how do we handle that?” So it’s unfair that the practical applications of it are not available to everyone. Then you mix in all the political grandstanding and bullshit that surrounds it, and it goes from unfair to absurd.”

Mad Men
“I think in many ways Don has had to pay for his crimes. Certainly not in the literal sense, but definitely karmically. His dishonesty with his family and with himself has come back to reap dividends, and not in a good way.”

“I’ve read reviews that take us to task for not having more African Americans or dealing with gay issues or women’s issues. And I think that criticism is fundamentally flawed because the show is not a travelogue through the ’60s. It’s about very specific people in a very specific place at a very specific time. That comes with warts and all.”

“Don has a very fleeting relationship with the truth. I think that’s a survival tactic for the most part, but it’s also a business approach. A lot of people, when the show first came out, said “This is such a bad guy.” He is in many ways, but he also has a weird, specific sense of morality. So I guess the thing I have least in common with Don is I’m honest to a fault — I have a very hard time lying. Don does not. ”

“It’s all in the wardrobe. I put on the suit, slick back my hair, and suddenly I’m a megalomaniacal bastard.”

“I suppose there’s a lot of him in me. The idea of where’s my next idea coming from? Am I a fraud? Are my best days behind me? All that anxiety is very much there in my own sensibility. But again, as a person in the world, you work through that or you wither.”

“A lot of people can’t stand silence. They give away so much information. This guy gives away nothing.”

“This was the best thing I had ever read and said, Too bad they won’t cast me… It’s the only job where I said out loud that I want it. And I’m glad I got it.”

“There’s an awful lot I love about it. I get to wear amazing clothes. I get to say outlandish things that are exactly what a man like Don would have said at the time.”

“I don’t like having to smoke three packs of cigarettes every day, even though they’re herbal, not tobacco. There’s always a cloud of smoke over everything. But that’s how it was.”

“Don has brought back a sort of brooding, mysterious intensity. I think a lot of women find that strangely appealing. He’s also very masculine and many people find that sexy. But he’s probably not the greatest person to live with!”

“Does Don fundamentally change? I think he tries. I think he wants to be a good father, a good husband, a good boss, or a good employee. But very often he slips back to his actual way of being in the world, which continues this season.”

“I get fans coming up to me and telling me off for how Don treats his wife, but it’s never extreme hatred or anything like that. It’s more like,’How do you get away with that?’ I think there is a lot of amazement at the way Don leads his life.”

Acting
“My first acting job, so the story goes, was in first grade. I was picked by my teacher to be Winnie the Pooh in our first-grade production of Winnie the Pooh—back when, you know, public school programs still had things like productions of Winnie the Pooh, and music programs and recess and things like that.”

“Acting is sort of an extension of childhood. You get to play all of these roles and have so much fun. Playing an athlete would be so cool. Or where you get to shoot guns, ride horses. I wouldn’t turn down any of that. ”

Lipschtick
“I was working downtown as a set dresser for some very bad softcore porn when I got the call from New York. I was making $150 a day and my friend was the electrician, so we would share a ride to work. I would carry my little bucket around and move what needed to be moved, but I would be terrible at it. I would fall asleep in a corner and they could never find me. So when I got the call, even though we had not particularly hit it off, I was like, yes, anything but this. I had no money, no car and all these parking tickets. Anything to get out of here.”

Saturday Night Live
“It’s a thrill and a rush. The show can be amazing or it can be miserable, and that’s why some people tune in – in case its going to be a train wreck! Between that, a spoof on ‘Sesame Street’ and being lampooned on ‘The Simpsons’, I feel like we’re hitting some pretty great American cultural touchstones right now. It’s been amazing.”

The Division
“Being in an ensemble cast is the best. You`re all in the same boat. You`re all together.”

Howl
“There’s a line in the movie that says ‘I think that publicity engendered by this trial is going to bring this poem to a much wider audience than it ever would have had,’. I think that argument can certainly be made for the Prop 8 situation, where publicity engendered by all this brings to light the absurdity of ascribing second-class status to an entire group of people.”

“I wanted the opportunity to be the voice of rational thought and the defender of artistic expression.”

Theater
“Jim Miller was one of the first directors I worked with. He’s staggeringly talented: a director, costume designer, acting teacher. He really taught me a lot about making choices, being bold and being proud of being an actor.”

“He’s a multitalented guy who asks students and protégés to rise to a high level. That’s what you want at that level of your education, to be inspired, challenged and driven, especially in an industry where most people fail. You need that kind of inspiration to succeed.”

“We had an incredibly talented cast of people and did some cool work as young kids. We were all proud of “Assassins”.”

The Simpsons
“I got to work on ‘The Simpsons,’ which I watched for 20 years and the show is still fresh and still funny and the characters still resonate. It’s one of the best shows on television. It was an honor to be asked to be a part of it.”