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.

People who have followed my career still call me Ron, and that's OK; most of the young kids call me Metta, and then everyone in China calls me Panda. In the Middle East, they call me World Peace.

I've led a very privileged life. You know, I've gotten to choose the work I do, and I hope every job I've had has been a little bit about trying to push the ball forward, particularly for folks who may not have the same opportunities that I've had.

We as an industry need to do a better job of increasing the awareness of the show, decreasing the ticket price, and making it a better experience online to buy tickets.

I'm not going to have a perfect career. It's better to be Billy Wilder and make lots of movies and have five or six great ones than to make so few movies that when you make a bad one it crushes you.