I don't want people to kick my ass, I just want to get to a point where they can't kick it.
As much as Parkinson's is about movement, the end stage is being frozen. So the more I let that happen, the more I'm gonna be stuck within that and unable to reverse it.
The moment I understood this - that my Parkinson's was the one thing I wasn't going to change - I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research is funded.
My view of life is colored by humor and looking at the best in any situation.
As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me.
What other people think about me is not my business.
I didn't just want to be a poster boy and sign on to publicize somebody else's method of operations. If I was going to put myself out there, I wanted to make sure that it was to an end. So I got involved with this congressional hearing about Parkinson's being underfunded.
I've never gotten up to see something one of my kids wanted to show me and not been rewarded.
I still play hockey every now and then, and I still golf. But my biggest exercise is walking my big dog in the park every day.
The least amount of judging we can do, the better off we are.
I can't be smug, because I know that you can lose anything at any point. And I can't be angry, because I haven't lost it.
I have a remarkably normal life.
Tracy is more a help to me than I am to her.
When I was younger, I was always described as happy-go-lucky.
No matter how much money you have, you can lose it.
I'm also very proud to be a part of a trilogy of films that, if they do nothing else, allow people to check their problems at the door, sit down and have a good time.
I often say now I don't have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson's, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.
Always be available to your kids. Because if you say, 'Give me five minutes, give me ten minutes,' it'll be 15, it'll be 20. And then when you get there, the shine will have worn off whatever it is they wanted to share with you.
I have so many things that I say to my kids, I just drive them crazy.
I discovered that I was part of a Parkinson's community with similar experiences and similar questions that I'd been dealing with alone.
I mean, I enjoy my work as an actor. But to make a difference in people's lives through advocacy and through supporting research - that's the kind of privilege that few people will get, and it's certainly bigger than being on TV every Thursday for half an hour.
Now I feel and I say all the time that vanity is, like, long gone. I'm really free of worrying about what I look like, because it's out of my shaky hands. I don't control it. So why would I waste one second of my life worrying about it?
After a year or so I really thought I was Howard Hughes. Here I was at eighteen years old, getting all these checks.
You've probably read in People that I'm a nice guy - but when the doctor first told me I had Parkinson's, I wanted to kill him.
I wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity to make those three films that didn't do well. They were really important to me, and the things I learned doing them were important to me.
Pain is temporary, film is forever.
I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That's what happiness is.
I don't set a whole lot of goals. It smacks a little bit of will to me, and I find that will is not the way to go for me.
Pity is just another form of abuse.
So I never spend a lot of time analyzing why people respond to my work. But I think that it's just the joy, a passion for life, that I think has always been in my characters. Beyond that, I'm just grateful for it.
I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor.
If you have doubts about someone, lay on a couple of jokes. If he doesn't find anything funny, your radar should be screaming. Then I would say be patient with people who are negative, because they're really having a hard time.
My wife is Jewish, and therefore, it's my children's birthright to be Jewish.
I'm not a shill for the Democratic Party.
I like to encourage people to realize that any action is a good action if it's proactive and there is positive intent behind it.
Humility is always a good thing. It's always a good thing to be humbled by circumstances so you can then come from a sincere place to try to deal with them.
I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.
I'm kind of private and I keep things inside a lot, but it's been so wonderful to realize that people care about you in a very deep way and that there is some bond between an actor and his audience. I don't even know how to describe that feeling.
The 'Rescue Me' gig was a unique opportunity to play a character - a misanthropic, angry guy - who was so contrary to how people think of me.
I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don't even know are available to us.
Pity is a benign form of abuse.
I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn't nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.
I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business.
I don't subscribe to any particular doctrine or ideology. I just think that there's kind of a good and bad, the good being life in its purest, happiest form, and the other being the darker side of existence.
The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It's got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.
Everybody in the world knew who I was before I knew who I was.
You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don't know what I want. I don't want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.
I was eccentric, even as a kid. I was an early reader, an early talker. I was very curious in a way that maybe the other kids weren't. I was a little more outgoing.
