One of the things you learn as an actor is that human beings are capable of almost anything. I'm sort of in the business of illustrating that fact.
What fascinated me most was Churchill as a young child. He had a kind of Dickensian childhood. The neglect. And he was a terrible student. His whole life is a study in trying to overcome your feelings of inadequacy.
Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.
Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.
I'm too much of a Libra. I too often see the other person's point of view and capitulate, even though I have strong political convictions. It's just my liability. Maybe I'm too empathetic. That's the actor in me.
It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
I loved playing Roberta Muldoon!
Other people have often had more faith in me than I had in myself - I never thought I could pull off Roberta Muldoon in 'The World According to Garp,' or 'Of Mice and Men's' Lennie as one of my first acting jobs.
I do think - I always tell that to young people - go to college, do theater, work with an audience. Don't try to learn how to act in front of millions and millions of people. Don't make that your first ambition, to be on a sitcom or get into the movies. Learn who you are as an actor, and the best way to do that is to do it in front of an audience.
I'm a very hopeful person. I mean, I'm an optimistic person, sometimes stupidly optimistic.
My hairline is receding. So my days as a romantic lead - even though I've never had them - are behind me.
I am such a coward when it comes to political arguments. I tend to sort of recoil rather than engage.
I'm an avid Boston Red Sox fan.
Churchill faced his own diminishing capabilities and increasing irrelevance by maintaining the sense that he was the only one who could solve whatever problem was before him. He was very often wrong, of course, but then he had spent so much of his life overcoming appalling mistakes, disasters, and rejections.
When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso - I remember that experience so vividly.
I'm as vain as the next person, but I've made so much fun of myself over the years, and that's very salutary as you grow older.
One of the problems in our lives is that people from different segments of our society just don't communicate with each other, nor do you ever see entertainment where they communicate with each other and fight with each other.
We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.
I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.
It's a delightful thing to do, to entertain kids. They're a completely different audience because of their total lack of irony. You're always after a total suspension of disbelief, but the only people you can really achieve it with is children.
