Quotes

I like people who try to do big things.

I was going to middle school in Berkley, and I did not fit in at all. Like a lot of kids, I found theater to be a good place for me.

I try to work and enjoy life, and that's about all.

As an actor I'm part of a long line of character people you can take back to the silent movies. There's always the little guy who's the sidekick to the tall, good-looking guy who gets the girl.

Without a plan, there's no attack. Without attack, no victory.

I'm not an improv guy. I'm not a nerd, I play one on television.

I'm at least getting my foot in the door as far as doing straight dramatic parts, which no one would have ever considered me for in the '80s. I never objected to that because I love doing comedy, and I'm not the kind of actor that insists that unless you're doing a serious dramatic role, you're not acting.

I tend to not really care for remakes in general. Mainly they are horrible.

The movies that I did in the '80s were either good or bad, but I never was oppressed with any feeling - I mean, I thought it was ridiculous to play high school or college students when I was 30. But at the same time, that was really done then.

I'm a character actor but unlike a lot of character actors, I don't look radically different from film to film and there was a bunch of them at once.

In 1984, nobody knew what cable was going to be. It was there, but you didn't know where it was going.

It was very natural that people just think of me as a comic actor.

My vision had always been that I was gonna be a stage actor and that was it.

To be honest, I haven't seen a lot of the current crop of teen movies because there's only so much time and there's nothing that really drives me to do it.

Sometimes, a person has to be dead a while before people can appreciate what they did when they were alive.

You can do gross-out until the cows come home but if there isn't something to balance it, then it's not going to work at all.

There's something about the way of playing a repellent character, that if you can play him with a certain amount of charm, you can get away with a lot.

For an actor to have a role that they're recognized and remembered for over the years, it's unusual. It's very lucky if it happens once - and it's luck that it's happened to me a couple of times.

[on Risky Business (1983)] It was a very, very strange because I had trained to be a stage actor, and that was my goal. My goal was not to make movies or do television. That wasn't on my agenda at all. The fact that I was doing an off-Broadway play in New York and got some attention, and people started sending me out for film auditions. That's just one of those things that happened. I assumed, especially since the ones I'd gone in on, I hadn't gotten, that this was just part of my job. I have to go in and read for these people, but there was no thought of - and so when I got this part - in the first place, of course, Tom [Cruise] was all of 18, I think, at the time. I had no idea who he was. He'd done a few movies, but nothing I'd seen, and so to me, he was just another really ambitious, young actor who worked very hard, and no reason to think necessarily until I saw the film that he had necessarily a huge career ahead of him until I saw the film and went, oh, okay. I get that now. It was a very good experience, but I was conscious at all times that this was probably the only time that I would do a movie, so I kept a journal for the whole time I was on the movie-copious journal, making notes every day, not just about the movie but about what was going on outside the movie and all that and the different characters, the people I was working with, and so on. I remember thinking vividly because I knew this was the only time anyone would ever hire me to do a movie, so I wanted to remember the experience.