Quotes

• “I’m not going to play a guy with MS or a guy in a wheelchair. I can play a dramatic character, certainly, but I’m not the real chameleon-type actor who, you know, changes his voice and everything.”
• “Sometimes I stop and think how strange this all is. Something that began as a little idea in Austin, that Wes and I just walked around talking about between ourselves, has turned into all this.”
  “The director made that decision not to use my butt…I don`t know how to interpret that.” - On having a body double for a scene in You, Me and Dupree (2006).
• “Acting is more fun than writing. Writing is harder, more like having a term paper.”
• “Actually, to be honest, a shotgun wedding might be the way to go for me. You can’t stay at the party forever. At some point, you have to take stock and ask yourself, What am I doing here?”
• “Ben, for example, is kind of a moody guy, and you kind of have to put on the kid gloves because you never know which Ben is going to show up on set.”
• “I can’t think of a movie I wish I’d acted in, but there are movies I wish I’d written.”
• “I definitely would like to do some more dramatic roles.”
• “I have never taken myself that seriously as an actor.”
• “I think the way it works is that when you’re casting a movie, you usually want to work with people that you believe in.”
• “The studio said Bottle Rocket (1996) was their worst-testing movie in history, so I looked into the marines. Maybe I was influenced by An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). Or those marine commercials - they were so cool! Like a Led Zeppelin song come to life.
• “The walk off was the most uncomfortable scene for me to shoot, cos I literally have never danced in public or really even in private. I’m not a musical person and we had to dance like Michael Jackson and we had to do breakdancing.”
• “To me, being cool is just the opposite of living. It’s about not getting too worked up about anything, by being ‘Nyah, nyah, nyah,’ and no big deal. I can’t stand that. It’s such a jaded, clichéd posture to take. I get real enthusiastic about stuff. It’s what I think is life-affirming.”
• “We spent so much time together that I can remember us being in our teens and our dad saying we should try to find some other friends because he thought we were our own lowest common denominator when we got together.” - On his brothers
• “You can think of Hollywood as high school. TV actors are freshmen, comedy actors are maybe juniors, and dramatic actors - they’re the cool seniors.”
• “It’s funny how it usually works out that I end up dying. It sort of works out, because by the time I die, I’m usually tired of working on that particular movie, so I look forward to it.”
• Talking about his relationship with Sheryl Crow and his relationships with women in general]: “Going out with someone who’s doing the same thing as you, who’s in the public eye, can be a problem… You want a break when you come home. You don’t want someone with the same issues as you maybe reminding you of stuff you don’t like in yourself. That being said, I don’t think being in the spotlight had anything to do with me and Sheryl not working out. The story of our relationship is the same story I’ve had with most of my relationships. I was lucky enough to find a great girl, and because of my lack of… focus, the relationship went south.”
• “Acting just doesn’t seem that scary to me. It’s just a feel you get and you do it.”
• “I feel that’s the way the world should be–you know, you go out for a jog and people yell your name and say hello.”
• “I like people who get obsessed with something. For example, I’m not that interested in chess but I’m really interested in Bobby Fischer because he’s just kind of obsessed with chess.”
• “I think I missed 23 of my 26 gym sessions for [it]. When I arrived on set and took my shirt off, the director took one look at me and said, ‘I think maybe your character is the kind of guy who swims with his shirt on.” (On Anaconda) “
• “I think there is a middle child syndrome. I don’t know quite what it is but I think I suffer from it.”

• “I’d love to wear a cowboy hat now. You know how people get on Prozac and all that stuff? It’s impossible to be depressed wearing a cowboy hat.”(On his cowboy hats)

• “It has come from director John Lasseter’s love of cars, he has set it in a world of cars, and I am literally the voice of a race car. So it tells my journey, starting as an obnoxious race car, who gets his comeuppance and learns his lessons. It’s a really Hollywood story!” (On his movie ‘Cars’)

• “There are tougher ways to spend the day, believe me.” (On sex scenes)

• “There hasn’t been a lot of thought or planning about the roles I’ve taken.”

• “This is the first ever race I have been to, and it is pretty exciting to be backstage and to see what goes into it. It seems much more technological than NASCAR which we have in the US. There’s a lot of race fans here, and it struck me how strange it is that in every game, America has its own version – and it’s the same with racing. I kind of wish we took part more, so we could be involved in all of this.”

• “We were good until we started getting into firecrackers and girls.”(On his brothers).