I'm an old school actor in the sense. More and more now, I play myself as I get older. Even as a writer, I never got typecast. I've always bounced from project to project or initiated my own things.

Chris O'Dowd is a very special talent. He's one of those very, very rare actors who can be the clown, or he can be the straight man playing off the clown, in a scene.

The truth is very few of us are related to Napoleon or Cleopatra. Although, those are bad examples as I am actually descended from both of them.

There's no traditional three act structure - or beginning, middle and end - to a family tree. By its nature, it has almost infinite different branches, or episodes, to explore in every direction.

I'm an optimistic guy. I'm one of those big dreamers. I'm one of those kids with that annoying imagination.

I'm kind of shocked that it's taken Hollywood so long to realize that so many great movie talents can come out of television. One of the reasons they do is that on TV you don't have the luxury of a film's big budget, and people have to compensate with creativity.

With imagination and personal creativity, people who sew can design the way they look to suit themselves.

In the visual arts, particularly painting, I distrust all those abstractions, those artificial constructions. I have a very simple way of judging them: if I can do them, they are not art.