"There are two types of actors: those who say they don't want to be famous and those who are liars."

"I think of myself more as a workhorse actor. It will be hot and cold and up and down, but no one will kick me out of the business."

[about his preference for being nude when at home] "There's something therapeutic about nudity. Clothing is one of the external things about a character. Take away the Gucci or

Levis and we're all the same. But not when the nanny is around. But I will with my wife and kids."

[on his wife, Kyra Sedgwick] "Kyra is a woman who made all the wrong choices when it comes to being an actress. She got married too young, had a kid and then had another kid."

[on L.A.] "That's where the industry is. There is a tremendous amount of business you can do just by walking through restaurants and just being there."

"I want to see the numbers that prove that show-business marriages are any less successful than other marriages. It's just very public when they fail."

[on the Oscar season] "I call it the bitter season, because year after year, I've seen it come and go and not been a member of the club. And yet I've continued to make a living as an actor."

"I think of being an actor as kind of a young man's gig. It's emasculating, in a way, people messing with you and putting make-up on you and telling you when to wake up and when to go to sleep, holding your hand to cross the street. I can do it up to a certain point and then I start to feel like a puppet."

[on playing a pedophile in The Woodsman (2004)] "I don't have people who would advise me against this based on some sort of 'image.' At some point you have to decide if you're going to be a personality or you're going to be an actor. If playing this kind of a role could have a negative effect on my public personality, I don't care. I'll play anything, if I think there's something compelling, or there's a director I'm dying to work with, or a part I hadn't done before or a co-star I think is great."

"A long time ago, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a pop star. Then I started taking acting classes. I moved to New York when I was a teenager, and really wanted to be a serious actor. I wanted to do off-Broadway, I wanted to do [Anton Chekhov], [William Shakespeare]. I wanted to have a Meryl Streep kind of career. When Footloose (1984) came out, I became a pop star, but by then that's not what I wanted. I wasn't being taken seriously. I wasn't smart about the industry and the ways that you can parlay pop stardom into a serious acting career if you make the right choices. I spun my wheels for a while, and then I got this part in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991). It's a small part, but very character-driven: gay, fascist, I mean, it was extreme. That turned things around for me. I didn't even read for it. Oliver just looked at me and said, 'Will you transform yourself for me?' And I said, 'Yes.' Off-Broadway I'd been doing that, but that doesn't mean anybody in the movie industry is going to see you that way."

"You can sit around and complain that Hollywood doesn't make any good movies. But you can generate your own material. So I read books. I come up with ideas. I was the producer on The Woodsman (2004) to help get that off the ground. Sometimes that extends itself to directing."

"I've heard people say you have to love the characters you play. I don't feel that way. I've played a lot of people that I don't love at all. What's important to me is to try to make them real."

"And life has taught me that if I am to have a satisfying career, I have to take three things out of the mix. The first is the size of my part. The second is the size of the budget. And the third is the size of my salary. Once you get rid of those things, your possibilities exponentially explode. You get to work with the directors who matter. You get to make movies like The Woodsman (2004)."

"There are two types of actors: performers and personalities."

[on watching his early performances] "I never go back and watch myself. I'll see a film when it's new, maybe twice, but then not for years. If I'm flicking channels on TV and one of them is on, I flick right past it. It's so hard. If I looked at it I'd go, 'Aw shit, I should have done this, done that.' A lot of stuff about my past work bugs me. I guess I'm only seeing the faults."