If I do three movies in a year, I don’t feel like acting ever again.

In New York, you‘ve got Donald Trump, Woody Allen, a crack addict and a regular Joe, and they’re all on the same subway car.

The theater, for me, has always been a place where I’m free to be more creative, a place to sharpen my tools.

I like [that] there’s a certain inherent drama to those jobs that is exciting to tell stories about and it’s still real life. I’m a little less interested in the current fad of being obsessed with superheroes and things that are so out of the box.

Time is what creates trust.

Friends can hurt you, but the possibility of pain with lovers is so much greater because your expectations are so high. You don’t ask as much of your friends.

If you don’t risk doing something foolish, you’ll never do anything special.

Give your heart to everybody you meet. The rest is pretense.

Right now the only people I can really fall in love with are people who don’t really, truly want me around. Now why do I do that?

The thing that makes a great genre movie is one that’s not just entertainment, not just horror or sci-fi or whatever. The ones I love are the genre pictures with some subversive message underlying it all.

The truth is that the more you get paid, the less freedom you have. They never pay you for nothing.

Nothing teaches you like getting leveled. And I got leveled in my early 30s. Nothing went exactly the way I thought it would.

As a young man… you don’t know anything about yourself. And add on to that, you’re on the cover of magazines. People are interviewing you about what you think. You feel like a real phony.

The biggest problem in my life is trying to be the kind of man that I want to be, the father that I want to be, and how to process the failure of my marriage.

In your mid-twenties, the paint is still wet on who you are.

You know, I auditioned for ‘Titanic.’ Sometimes I muse on what would have happened. That would have been such a different life.

If you’re not a real chameleon of an actor and if you’re not one of those guys who can really shape-change themselves all the time, one of the ways to keep pushing yourself and keep changing is to be in different kinds of movies.

You don’t need other people to affirm that you’re a valuable person.

If you can understand the inner life, then you can wear the uniform, the tattoos, or whatnot and realize that the things that are different about us become superficial.

I have totally hitched my wagon to the horse of storytelling, and the idea that none of us know why we’re born, or why we’re gonna die, or what we’re planted here, or what’s on the other side of the galaxy, or when time began, or when time end. The whole nature of reality is pretty up for grabs, really.

It is very difficult for any couple who are married if both people are ambitious. I don’t know if it’s just too hard to be married to a woman that wants to be a movie star.

I was being taken around by a press agent at the Venice Film Festival at age 18. Was it fun? Sure. But it was a dangerous path to be walking on as far as having a substantive life. Because the casualty rate at the Venice Film Festival for 18-year-olds? High.

I’m horrified to admit that I just love Salinger. I was devastated to find out that other people feel the same way.

Some people burn out, and some people like Clint Eastwood, he was a wild, international movie star in his 30s, and he’s doing the best work of his life now. Go figure.

It’s difficult to do a genre film well, and it doesn’t matter if you’re talking vampire movies or ‘Dawn of the Dead‘ or ‘The Thing’ or ‘Escape From New York.’ Those kind of movies, they understand what the old-school B-movie is supposed to be, they get the throwback of it.

There’s something about knowing life is finite that makes it so precious.

Depression is a real demon in the woods for a lot of creative people, you know? It’s part of what the documentary is trying to be about for me, finding balance, where the beauty that is attainable in the creative arts can be matched with the scratchy roughness of regular life.

The girls who like me aren’t the ones I like. Or, if I do and they want to commit, I suddenly need tons of time with my friends.

Right now, if you’re interested in being a dramatic actor, they’re not making that many just regular dramas. Movies have to have some other thing going on.

I have had so many bad auditions.

The more kind of head trippy sci-fi. I always like that. I was a big ‘Twilight Zone‘ freak.

In all of our society, but especially in Hollywood, there is an obsession with perfection that can lead to self-loathing and neurosis and all that kind of stuff.

The older I get, the more obvious it is that you’re not really in control of your life, you’re a part of a larger wave, no matter who you are.