I had a Southern accent but I had broken it so hard.

Comedy is so hard; it's so much harder than drama. The pacing of it, the energy of it.

I'm challenged by people like Russell Crowe and Sean Penn who come in with such incredible discipline and power.

I had a Southern accent but I had broken it so hard.

I think that often times Hollywood panders to the cliches of small town life, specifically Southern small town life, and I think that this movie does the opposite.

I want to be so strong as an actor that people wouldn't say... eh, that's Josh Lucas.

I'll look at the script and I'll try to find as many books, movies, and pieces of music that I think are going to feed each scene or the character as a whole.

Always do something different. Always different things.

I got so used to being unstable that I started to only be comfortable being unstable.

On A Beautiful Mind, there was a wall of math.

It's funny, but we were living on this small island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina when I was 9.

There's such good people out there where there filmmaking world is alive.

I've worked with some incredibly difficult directors but my understanding is that a lot of the best people are driven from a place of being extremely challenging and dark within their way.

I think actors become jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none.

I visited those friends who'd just had a baby, and she was washing dishes and he was cleaning the house, and I burst with happiness. And in their minds, they were in this terrible domestic rut.

I'm right at a time when I'm strongly finding my identity inside of my work.

When I was on that boat, I realized the only way I would feel creatively challenged was if I totally changed everything about my environment and put myself in a storm, in a sense.

I love experiencing other people's realities, seeing the world through their eyes for a short period of time.

My instincts are not comedic.

This fear of death infused me with the desire to live, and to live harder.

The Hulk, that was the experience of my life, so far.

I had friends of mine tell me they had a baby, and I didn't even know they were pregnant.

Every day is intense and alive, whether it's travel, work, even down time, which there is so little of.

New York has got this sort of wonderful romantic idea of the South.

So when we finally settled down outside of Seattle I felt totally uncomfortable with that idea.

No, well, my father's definitely not Christopher Walken.

My nomadic childhood dramatically fed my eventual decision to be an actor, but not in the way you might think.

I love how people in this business push themselves to know themselves, the world, and their creativity better.

It was a long period of time where I tried to figure out what worked, what didn't work.

I think I've spent so much time playing characters that are so far away from me and learning how to technically build and how to technically put something on top of you.

It's the South that maintains the idea that they're different, which is interesting because nobody else really cares.

At a certain point, even if the one alpha male is dominant, at a certain point there's a younger lion that is stronger, and everyone knows it.

Wrap parties can be really sad, actually, disorienting.

Once everyone else around you starts to become incredibly comfortable - if anything, quite happy with what you are doing - then I start to settling in and trusting all those choices that I've made up to that point.

A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power.

As long I still have a breath left in me I will dedicate myself fully to China's reform.

Vanity was a joke. She was an image created to make money.

When you overcome a profound loss, or there's some catalyst in your life that shifts everything, if you're able to take it in stride and heal, it can make for much more three-dimensional and empathetic people.

Avoid running at all times.

How is having every phone call that I make to my wife, to my daughter, relevant to any terror investigation?

I use Graf Edmonton for boots and John Wilson blades.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

Comedy is the most palliative way to make a point. People are more willing to listen if they can laugh.

The Fed contributed to the financial crisis, keeping interest rates too low for too long. I give them credit for responding and stabilizing the economy and the financial sector during the crisis. But then they tried to do too much with quantitative easing that went on forever, just dramatically exploding their balance sheets.

I had to write something and couldn't think of a plot, so I decided to write a Cinderella story because it already had a plot! Then, when I thought about Cinderella's character, I realized that she was too much of a goody-two-shoes for me, and I would hate her before I finished ten pages.

I think using anti-aging products really helps; the sooner the better, you know?

In America, it has been proven that the bulk of spending money is in the hands of women between 60 and 80, so it's so stupid. The people who do have the time and money to shop are either retired or empty-nesters.

How much a dunce that has been sent to roam, excels a dunce that has been kept at home.

Woodrow Wilson called for leaders who, by boldly interpreting the nation's conscience, could lift a people out of their everyday selves. That people can be lifted into their better selves is the secret of transforming leadership.