I'd love to be a saxophonist. I don't know why but I pretend I'm the saxophonist when I listen to music. I have about as much chance playing the sax as I do learning how to fly.

I suppose I am a frustrated musician so I annoy my family by playing guitar in the house. I used to be into acoustic stuff but my son Joseph is learning drums so now I have an electric guitar and we play Metallica. We have an amp and a PA in the garage with his drum kit.

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.

I started playing ukulele first for 2 years from age 9 to 11 and got my first guitar and got inspired by blues I heard on the radio that turned me on and I started learning myself.

My mom had this romantic notion of her children playing classical music. The idea is you learn it when you're still learning language. It's using the same part of the brain.

It is never easy to win but it is a lot easier to win when you play well. The key is winning golf tournaments when you are not playing so well. Managing your game is something that I feel that I am still learning to do.

By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college to a school of higher learning.

I want to see a player on the football field. I want to see what kind of teammate they are what kind of leadership qualities they have. I want to see how aggressive they are how much fun they have playing the game.

I am endlessly fascinated that playing football is considered a training ground for leadership but raising children isn't. Hey it made me a better leader: you have to take a lot of people's needs into account you have to look down the road. Trying to negotiate getting a couple of kids to watch the same TV show requires serious diplomacy.

Yeah my drum programming especially is based on my knowledge of playing a drum kit. For the bass too definitely. It was the first thing that I translated any sort of ideas through. It must have shaped it somehow.

'For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge' took a year to record that's why the playing on it might sound somewhat labored. 'Balance ' on the other hand was written and recorded in only four months so the whole process was quicker and more immediate.

Knowledge is not a passion from without the mind but an active exertion of the inward strength vigor and power of the mind displaying itself from within.

Intelligence is playing a more important role in policymaker decisions than I think I've ever seen in my time in Congress or before.

But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there.

I had this wild imagination. I was never me. All my childhood photos I'm in fancy dress playing a Russian refuge or Marvelous Mad Madam Mim.

Essentially I'm untrained so I just go with my imagination and try to put myself as solidly as I can into the shoes of whatever person I'm going to be playing.

It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing.

Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That's why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

I love doing comedy. You don't get many good comedy scripts. They're rare. But I do love playing comedy. Even in drama I like to try to find the humor because I think it's very human.

But it was this tough little character part that I was playing a very funny little guy that I invented over a weekend because I realized I was not contributing to the humor of this thing. And I had to do something.

I think great humor lies in playing the truth of a situation. I see myself as a performer and that applies to a Greek drama or a modern comedy.

I think great humor lies in playing the truth of a situation.