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 find forgiveness to be really healthy.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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've finally learnt how to say, 'No comment'. To appear in the tabloids is a real learning curve and a steep one at that. You had better learn quick or you get burnt.

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.