Happy Birthday Alec Baldwin!

I'm not an awards-driven person in anything. Anytime you do get caught up in that, you usually end up getting whacked.

I went to Jimmy Gandolfini's funeral, and when I was there, I realized Jimmy Gandolfini didn't have Twitter. 

My whole life is classical now. Except my wife. I don't have a classical wife. I have a classy wife, but I don't have a classical wife. 

Everybody had posters in their room; everybody had the four symbols of Zeppelin on the wall and all that. 

I'm not an impressionist, per se, but if you do any kind of comedy - and they ask you to do that, most of the time - there's some degree of appreciation, I think, involving somebody you like. 

'The Apprentice' was a huge success, and Trump was a huge television star who managed to trick people into thinking he was the guy from the show. 

The Trump name is now going to mean something else. 

I want my weekends back so I can be with my kids. 

All actors have a significant amount of vanity about work, and necessarily so. Things they will do and won't do, and I've completely lost all of that. I don't care.

I think about how much I used to work and how much I used to make that the priority.

If I won the lottery tomorrow, I probably would never work again. 

I don't hate Trump, but he's not somebody I admire. 

I think Jerry Lee is sad. As a musician, he was far more talented than Elvis Presley. Everybody down in Memphis knows that. Elvis became a movie star because he was beautiful. Not that Elvis wasn't talented, but Jerry Lee Lewis was incomprehensibly talented as a musician. 

John McTiernan, the director, is not Ingmar Bergman. He does action-adventure movies. 

The wealthy don't have any sense of humor. It's not like the English, where the theater is perhaps the one place where they have a sense of humor about themselves. 

Look at the shows that are really successful on Broadway. They're musicals. They're things that a woman will pick out the tickets for, or a man will buy the tickets with a woman in mind. It's a date. It's boyfriend-girlfriend, husband-wife. That's what the theater in New York has become. 

The harshest thing I can say is I was married to someone for whom all dissent was abuse. If you had your own opinion, you were abusive. 

There are women who get divorced in order to punish. Out of this bitter, bitter hatred that some of these women have for their ex-husbands, they turn their children against them. 

Acting in the theatre is fun; acting in film is work.

Everything that Bush touches turns to manure in public policy. 

I don't need to be married to Georgia O'Keeffe or Lillian Hellman, but I like being with a woman I can look up to.

My wife is the greatest person I have ever known. She is just a living doll; she is great person and a great mom. We have a girl and a boy, and we are going to have another boy.

I wanted to work with Cate Blanchett. She is one of the five greatest movie actresses of her generation.

I think my exact comment was that if Bush won it would be a good time to leave the United States. I'm not necessarily going to leave the United States.

Often in films, you have no idea where you're going to be six months from now. And I grew very weary of that. And television, although it wasn't necessarily as creatively diverse as filmmaking can be, it was the lifestyle choice that I needed to make. 

I just love Rome. It really does cast a spell on you.

Everybody I've ever worked with - 99.9 percent of the time, I've had a successful or very agreeable experience with. 

There's less critical thinking going on in this country on a Main Street level - forget about the media - than ever before. We've never needed people to think more critically than now, and they've taken a big nap.

Ultraconservatism is, to me, so illogical. Everywhere you go, conservatives want to cut, cut, cut, cut - cut money for powerless people. So, that's the biggest problem I have with them.

Nobody cares about your autograph. There are cameras everywhere, and there are media outlets for them to 'file their story'.

I remember during my lifetime I would meet women, and it was almost like God would say to me, 'Now, this woman here is not the one you are going to end up with, but she is going to be a lot like this woman; look at this woman, study this woman.' And when my wife showed up, He was like, 'You recognize her now?' 

I was in college in Washington, D.C. I did three years full-time. I did all my requirements, and my senior year was really a gut year. And I said, 'Law school will always be there.' I was in no hurry to get right into that. 

When I told my parents, 'I'm going to be an actor,' they screamed and wept and freaked out.

My life, in some ways, has been a half-measure. I didn't commit myself all the way to my marriage and family, because I would have given up more. And I didn't go all the way with just being completely selfish. I always wonder where my career would be if I was more selfish. 

I think I'm just like a lot of people who had nothing. 

I think I do want to go into politics. I really, really do. And I don't know if I will. 

I had a marriage that I came to in the same way everybody else comes to a marriage. We all take chances when we get married. 

When you're with someone, you want everything to be great. And that's the pressure that you put on, and what you just can't do. 

I don't want to be throwing the football on the front yard when I'm 75. I mean, I'm not opposed to men doing that. But I don't think it's gonna work for me. 

There are people who would rather choke than go see my movies. They write me letters all the time. 

I wanted to be president of the United States. I really did. The older I get, the less preposterous the idea seems.

Cheney is a terrorist. He terrorizes our enemies abroad and innocent citizens here at home indiscriminately. 

Down with Dukes of Hazzard! 

Doing these parts is not fun. It's challenging, but no fun. It's creepy. I would rather play the guy that throws the touchdown pass and gets carried off the field.

Bush wasn't elected, he was selected - selected by five judges up in Washington who voted along party lines.

I don't think I really have a talent for movie acting.

You have a lot of optimism when you are young. 

I wish I could play the lead role in one movie, one great movie.

I know there's an impression that I'm someone who seeks to have violent confrontations with people. I don't. Do I regret screaming at some guy who practically clipped my kid in the head with the lens of a camera? Yeah, I probably do, because it's only caused me problems. 

In the film business, when you're young, you just want to work. But when you're older, it has more to do with who's involved with the project - who you're going to get in the boat with. 

I consider myself a pretty good conversationalist, but you wind up being downgraded to idiot status when you don't speak the language! 

I collect travel alarm clocks. I was in a flea market in France once, in 1994, and I opened up this beautiful Jaeger-LeCoultre folding eight-day winding clock folded into a beautiful case, and I went, 'Wow, man.' And I've been collecting travel alarm clocks since 1994. 

Grown-ups yell. I don't know why, but they do. 

We all have that moment when we think, 'Hand me that Oscar now - you don't even have to have the ceremony'. 

I'd rather live my life off screen and give only a certain amount of energy to the work. 

On a television show, precise acting isn't the order of the day. 

My father would chaperone at high-school dances, and the toughest guy in the high school used to want to fight my father. My father broke his hand on a guy's head once in school. 

I have my older daughter Ireland and my wife Hilaria, and I have Carmen and Rafael. 

As my friend said to me, when you have children, typically in a second marriage, when you're older and you get married again to a woman who would have children, you must always remember that you make sure the children attend a college where the commencement ceremonies are held in a facility with a wheelchair accessible ramp. 

Have I thought about having more kids? Oh sure, that would be great; that would be heaven. That would be fantastic.

I think I'm just like a lot of people who had nothing. We had to amuse ourselves, so we had to become amusing. 

My brothers were funny, and there was a lot of shtick and comedy and nastiness and violence and fighting and sports. 

Hollywood does draw some very strange characters, and then the power of Hollywood and what they can do with it becomes like a blood sport to them. 

When you lack a certain vitality in the film business, there's no hiding it. It's like you've had your limb chopped off. How do you hide the fact that you're missing an arm? 

I don't try to communicate with my 'audience'. I don't bother with that any more. I used to try to have conversations with people, but it's futile. 

Success begets success. I've been offered a lot of movies now that '30 Rock' has been successful.

When I'm not working, I dress like a surfer. I look like I'm going to come into your house and clean your pool. 

When I get onstage in a play, I feel very safe, very protected, very fulfilled.

I feel I'm two people: I have my interest in acting and I have a lot of other political interests I'd like to pursue. 

I never thought of myself as a wealthy person. I've thought of myself as a person who has had a lot of luck. I don't have the same stress that other people have, but there are too many things I could have done differently if wealth was what I was after. If I was all about money, I would have lived in L.A. 

There's three things: there's masculinity, there's intelligence, there's sensitivity. You've got to bring those three things to a leading man's role: masculinity, sensitivity, intelligence. In some people, there's a little too much in the mix of one or the other. 

I'm the kind of person who does not want to be anywhere that I'm not wanted.

Remember, sex is like a Chinese dinner. It ain't over 'til you both get your cookie.

I'd do anything to have more kids. But that's probably not gonna happen now.

To be in this business and have tremendous integrity and only make distinguished choices is very tough. 

Soaps are the best. They really are. If you can do a soap, well, you can do anything. You have to learn pages of dialogue very quickly.

Getting older is hard. 

There are shows that are monolithic successes on TV that nobody in the business ever watches one episode of.

People don't understand this: if you want to have a really good shot at succeeding, there are doors you have to slam in people's faces and say, 'This is my priority, and you can't depend on me to help you.' I was never good at that. 

I have always wanted to do a show where I could stay home. When you make movies, you might as well take a dart and throw it at a map. 

Being able to stay home with my children is what I prefer.

I know some people who live this much more insulated life in Los Angeles, where their feet never touch public ground. They walk out of their bathroom, their living room, they get into their garage, their car, and the next thing you know, they're at the valet parking of the restaurant or the store or the office. They're in a bubble the whole time. 

I turned popular music on the radio, and I never listened to it again after that, in about 1985. That's when I switched over to classical music, and I pretty much stayed with that since then. 

There's almost no popular music I listen to now. I'll hear it because it's everywhere... Music is ubiquitous now. 

There are some times when you make films and you travel places, and the take that people in the business have is that the worst way to see a city is to shoot there, because you work these long 12, 13 and 14-hour days, and you go home to the hotel, you eat, and you pass out. 

I'm going to stop giving too much money to charity - the charity is going to become my family. I'm only half-kidding.

Everything I do is about my kids and wife and how we can all be together. 

My children are the only thing in my life that makes me happy. 

I loathe and despise the media in a way I did not think possible. 

I've had a relatively charmed life. I loved to be out in the city. New York was my town. I've had people come up to me and say, 'You're a great New Yorker. You've given your time and money to so many New York charities. You're a great supporter of the arts. I like some of your movies - and some of your movies suck, actually.' 

I haven't changed, but public life has. It used to be you'd go into a restaurant, and the owner would say, 'Do you mind if I take a picture of you and put it on my wall?' Sweet and simple. Now, everyone has a camera in their pocket.

In the theater, you act more of the time. In the movies, you get to act maybe 20 or 30 minutes of the day. I love acting in movies. It's just different.

I don't think acting is addictive. If I stopped acting tomorrow, I really wouldn't care. If you told me that I would have to sell real estate in New York City to look after my family, that would be fine with me. 

For better or ill, I was very heavily influenced by men I knew who always dressed formally. 

Let's face facts, this is visual medium, there's a very high premium put on people who are good-looking. But the minute you rely on that you get yourself in trouble. You certainly don't make a career out of that anymore as an actor. 

I'm a pretty loyal person.

You have actors who begin at a certain young age and there's very little change in their technique and the depth of their performances; they're the same 30 years later. 

A lot of people want to not wear a tie when they go to a restaurant. They feel they don't have to wear a tie. I think it's kind of a statement they're making. I don't know what that statement is. I haven't quite figured that out yet.

I won every award you could win in television. I got paid well. And people loved '30 Rock'. And I loved '30 Rock'. I mean, sometimes you do a show that's a hit show, and you hate it. 

I want to go make a movie and be very present for that and give it everything I have, and after we're done, then the rest of the time is mine.

I started out as an actor, where you seek to understand yourself using the words of great writers and collaborating with other creative people. Then I slid into show business, where you seek only an audience's approval whether you deserve it or not.

I worked all the time. Every moment I wasn't working, I was home with my family. I got divorced. And now I'm doing it all over again, and I've learned that the key is, I've got to work less. 

I need to be home more. That's the goal now. I have a steady flow of things people want me to do. 

Everything I hated about L.A. I'm beginning to crave. L.A. is a place where you live behind a gate, you get in a car, your interaction with the public is minimal. I used to hate that. 

Am I a homophobe? Look, I work in show business. I am awash in gay people, as colleagues and as friends. 

I'm doing 'Rock of Ages' one day, making out with Russell Brand. Soon after that, I'm advocating with Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Cynthia Nixon for marriage equality. 

It's good-bye to public life in the way that you try to communicate with an audience playfully, like we're friends, beyond the work you are actually paid for. 

There's a way I could have done things differently. I know that. If I offended anyone along the way, I do apologize.

I think Rachel Maddow is quite good at what she does. I also think she's a phony who doesn't have the same passion for the truth off-camera that she seems to have on the air. 

I find myself bitter, defensive, and more misanthropic than I care to admit. 

My goal was always to take a talk show to the network. I never wanted to be on MSNBC. 

I did not have a happy family life a few years ago. I was divorced, and I was very alienated from my daughter, and I was out there cutting every ribbon and running around New York hosting events for different causes to supplant my loss because I didn't have a family to go home to. Now I don't want to be Mr. Show Business anymore. 

I just can't live in New York anymore.