Frustration is a sign I am acting independently. The more you try your own way, the tighter the doors will stay closed.

When I first started out in the industry, I was 12 or whatever, and I wanted to be on something so bad, and I didn't know what I was going to be on. At the time, I was in school, and I was working on drama and theatrical stuff, so I never thought that I'd end up going to comedy.

I can face things that are out of my control and not act out of control.

The decisions you make today matter. Every decision points your life in the direction you are about to travel. No decision is an isolated choice. It's a chain of events. If you choose wisely, your future will reflect that. But if you don't choose wisely, the decisions you make now will take you to places you don't want to be later.

A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand. It stops us from taking anything for granted. It has also taught me about living in the immediate moment.

Life...is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

When a character wants to do one thing and I want him to do another, the character is usually right.

but I still held my breath waiting for Brünnhilde to rise up out of the pyre at the end. And then, instead of a beautiful maiden emerging from the flames, there rose up a great fat

We tend, today, to want to have a road map of exactly where we are going. We want to know whether or not we have succeeded in everything we do. It's all right to want to know—we wouldn't be human if we didn't—but we also have to understand that a lot of the time we aren't going to know.