When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso - I remember that experience so vividly.

If it's well written and well directed and you've got good actors to work with, acting is easy. But making sure all the ducks are in a row is the hard part. It's very rare.

I never get tired of hearing compliments.

One of the problems in our lives is that people from different segments of our society just don't communicate with each other, nor do you ever see entertainment where they communicate with each other and fight with each other.

The first long chapter of my career was almost entirely theater so that, by the time I was 30, 35, I sort of knew who I was as an actor, and I was gradually learning who I was as a human being.

Churchill faced his own diminishing capabilities and increasing irrelevance by maintaining the sense that he was the only one who could solve whatever problem was before him. He was very often wrong, of course, but then he had spent so much of his life overcoming appalling mistakes, disasters, and rejections.

Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.

Good acting is really excellent carpentry.

No villain thinks of himself as a villain, and that's the approach I always take.

I loved growing up in Ohio.

It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.

'Love Is Strange' was just a beautiful experience in so many ways.

I grew up with this crazy upbringing of living many places and always being the new kid in town, not like a service brat where you're always going to school with other new kids in town. I was constantly arriving in small towns and going to school with kids who'd been together since they were in kindergarten.

Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.

I am a storyteller, and the stories I tell are, when I'm lucky, really good ones. It's a very exciting thing to do with your life, and that's, I think, what keeps me hopeful.

The Broadway audience is made up of a greater percentage of tourists now. There's not nearly as much variety and danger and challenge in what's being offered.

Powerful people are always in charge. You have to acknowledge that and deal with it as a reality. They're not devils. They're not monsters. They're human beings, like us, that have their share of insecurities and fears. You have to contemplate that as you go through life.

I auditioned for soap operas and commercials; I remember auditioning for Lays potato chips. It was a sort of 'Mutiny on the Bounty' sketch, where Captain Bligh was torturing the crew by saying, 'You can only have one Lays potato chip,' and they all rise up.

It's a delightful thing to do, to entertain kids. They're a completely different audience because of their total lack of irony. You're always after a total suspension of disbelief, but the only people you can really achieve it with is children.

I won two Golden Globes, and there was a long, long period in between the wins. That might be explained by the fact that when I first won the award, for '3rd Rock on the Sun,' I satirically compared aliens on the show to the Foreign Press Association. And they did not take that well.

My wife is a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, but otherwise, I'd be right back living on the Upper West Side.

What fascinated me most was Churchill as a young child. He had a kind of Dickensian childhood. The neglect. And he was a terrible student. His whole life is a study in trying to overcome your feelings of inadequacy.

Oh, I'm dying to play Donald Trump someday, just because he's an unbelievable character. I'm a character actor; that's what you look for: outsized human beings.

Britain has a great sense of its own national pride. It's like the monarchy is the embodiment of that pride.