My mother gets all mad at me if I stay in a hotel. I'm 31-years-old, and I don't want to sleep on a sleeping bag down in the basement. It's humiliating.

A friend of my mom's was a casting director so, really as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.

There's something really great and romantic about being poor and sleeping on couches.

I got into acting as a young child on account of a sort of arbitrary thing. A friend of my mom's was a casting director, so really, as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.

I find forgiveness to be really healthy.

Rumors about me? Calista Flockhart, Pam Anderson, and Matt Damon. That's who I'm dating.

My movies are unadorned, they're not particularly fancy, I think they're kind of workmanlike in some ways, focusing on the writing and the acting.

I have a good relationship with the world. But I don't know what the trick is to maintaining it.

I started as a child, in this PBS series 'Voyage of the Mimi,' which led to driving down to New York for 'Afterschool Special' auditions, which led to moving to Los Angeles. I wanted to be an actor. But in L.A., I got into film technology, and I was building cheap editing systems and would edit my friend's acting reels.

Rumors about me? Calista Flockhart, Pam Anderson, and Matt Damon. That's who I'm dating.

Making movies has become such a golden ring, and it's all such a big business, that the rewards system has gotten totally out of whack. Suddenly, you're treated in a manner befitting someone who is actually an important person.

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

In our culture, we get very much into shorthanding people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer blahblahblah. It's hard to shake those sort of narratives.

I'm not the type of guy who enjoys one-night stands. It leaves me feeling very empty and cynical. It's not even fun sexually. I need to feel something for the woman and entertain the vain hope that it may lead to a relationship.

I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically.

I'm much more interested in what an actor has to say about something substantial and important than who they're dating or what clothes they're wearing or some other asinine, insignificant aspect of their life.

Marriage hasn't been my thing. But gay people, knock yourselves out!

I grew up in a house with a mother who was a teacher and a Freedom Rider - very left-wing Democrats living in a heterogeneous working-class neighborhood. I picked up a lot of those values there, and I brought them with me when I showed up in Hollywood.

You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

I like acting for myself as a director. I act and I know that I'll have a chance to have some say in what gets used and that I'll be able to give myself enough takes and be on the same page as myself about how the scene should play.

I've never held myself up particularly high when I had movies that worked, and I never held myself all that low when I had failures.

Yes, I'm going to be the President of the United States. You know why? You think you can get chicks by being in the movies? You can really get chicks by being the President.