I was as happy doing theater in New York for little or no money as I am now doing television for more money. The happiness I guess comes out of it being a good job. The success has to do with the fact that it's a good job that will continue.

I fell in love with theater there and after graduation I moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting.

At the School of Visual Arts in New York you can get your degree in Net art which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways.

I didn't do improv in college I never performed I didn't do theater either. I was in student government I was a history major.

I've been doing musical theater since I was a kid. And look for a CD from me in the future. I want to write all the songs!

When I was in college I was in the theater department which for anyone who has been involved in any kind of theater program you know that it's really wacky and tight-knit a real family. Me and my good friends from college would do random shows and plays that were sometimes serious but most of the time really goofy and funny.

When I was doing ensemble theater and comedy work I felt I had some talents. But when I started doing my shows in Berkeley and found that I could be funny on my own I was shocked.

The very first things that I did even in theater were bad guys. They are meaty roles for the most part. With the bad guy you have more freedom to experiment and go further out than with a good guy.

I had a job at a movie theater for like a year and a half and then a job at a health food store for like two years. Those were the only two jobs I ever had.

The wonderful thing about Food for Thought is that it lets you keep your hand in theater and be in front of a live audience without a commitment of six months or even three months.

The hope is they would like to bring it to Broadway next year so we'll see that's to come in the end of the finance year and everybody else and also real estate and what theaters are available at the time but I would like to come back with it.

My goal was not to be famous or rich but to be good at what I did. And that required going to New York and studying and working in the theater.

I'm terrified of being too famous. What I'm really afraid of is that the audiences will go into the theater and not be able to forget that it's me that fame will stand in the way of my acting. I want to keep being able to change into different shapes and different personalities.

You must not demand the failure of your peers because the more good things that are around in film in television in theater - why the better it is for all of us.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much you feel so guilty.

In some movies you feel like you're a very small part of a huge machine. Whereas in the theater you can have a very small part but you can still feel the weight and the gravity of it. Given the nature of theater it's a more concentrated and quiet experience.

I'd done table reads for my own screenplays and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts.

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person yes but an intense condensation of his experience not simply a realistic series of episodes.

There's a positive side to film and television the sense of feeding into the theater... Your fans will follow you hopefully and be open-minded to see you play other things and experience other stories you want to tell.

In Mexico theater is very underground so if you're a theater actor it's very difficult to make a living. But it's also a very beautiful pathway to knowledge and to an open education.

One of the things that's great about New York is that it is not a one-industry town. It has education academia the service industry arts publishing theater politics fashion finance as well as movie-making.

I was a total education geek. I loved school. I loved learning. I loved doing homework. All of my books and notebooks from high school are underlined and highlighted and there are notes all over the margins. And you know I was a theater kid too. I was all over the place.

The Washington black community was able to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. I mean we had our own newspapers our own restaurants our own theaters our own small shops our own clubs our own Masonic lodges.

It's not like I had big dreams to go to California and become an actor. I loved doing my shows at school and community theater and I probably would have settled in New York because it was closer. I was going to go to NYU.