I was the teenage kid growing up in New Jersey watching the Tony Awards and thinking, 'Oh, maybe if I'm lucky I'll make it to Broadway by the time I'm 40!'

I can get motivated seeing a kid at my son's school overcome a learning disability.

I found that looking at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from an outside vantage point was actually quite distancing. The history of the conflict, the personalities, the violence, the distrust, and the seeming lack of viable solutions made meaningful involvement feel impossible. What changed that, for me, was changing the vantage point.

Do you want to have a career that goes beyond, you know, 11 minutes in a 22-minute television show every week? Some people don't. That's fine.

It was great fun to hang around the Beatles. They had amazingly fast minds, and they were incredibly amusing and funny and witty. They were great. There was a very high energy surrounding them.

It's one thing to make people laugh, but after a certain point, comedy is almost cheap.

Stanley Kubrick went with his gut feeling: he directed 'Dr. Strangelove' as a black comedy. The film is routinely described as a masterpiece.

Drama is more universal. We all cry about the same stuff. But comedy is very specific: It depends on where you were born, how old you are, your social-economic status. It's very complicated to make people laugh.