"I do give a great deal of forethought and zone in on character and all sorts of things like that. Never before have I just stuffed something away in the back cupboard of my brain because it was just such a crazy concept."
"I was just a quiet kid, really. I wasn't the class clown at all."
"I'm very leery of show business, having been in Los Angeles for the last 10 years. Buzz is a dangerous thing that I've heard applied to a lot of people that I've since not heard of again."
"I was 12 when my parents told me we were moving to Lebanon. I remember thinking, 'Leba-who?' I had absolutely no concept of the place."
"My family moved - first to Washington, D.C., and then, in the spring of 1975, to Lebanon, where my father worked as a diplomat at the American embassy. My parents were enthusiastic about the move, so my older brother and I felt like we were off to some place kind of cool."
"When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace."
"I find fear is a great motivator to work hard."
"Whenever Hollywood gets involved with real life events, certain liberties have to be taken."
"I'm a terrible procrastinator. When we go to the airport, if they're not literally closing the door behind my sweaty, hyperventilating body, I feel I've been there too long."
"You learn more about a person from the people around that person than you do from the person themselves. We all have our own ideas of who we are that may or may not be justified, and you can really find out a heck of a lot more accurately from the people around an individual."
"I really don't make a concerted effort to try to find a type of role. Maybe I've just done enough of them now where people are like, 'Oh, it's the guy that's in a swirling vortex of despair, send it to Kinnear!' I don't really know, but it does seem to be a recurring theme."
"Same job, whether it's comedy or drama. Regardless of the weight of the role, I feel like the job is always kind of the same. Who is this person? What's this guy here, and how is he playing with this thing, and what's he trying to say? And what's the volley with all these other people around him?"
"There's times when I'll see a show, or something cooking on TV, and think, 'That can really be fun when it's working.' But it's a grind. I did that at NBC, it was five days a week. I was doing 'Talk Soup' and 'Later' at the same time. It's a hard job, more difficult than people realize."
"Sometimes I look back and think, 'Good. I'd love to go in and bang out a good episode of 'Talk Soup' today.'"
"Here's the thing about movies, all movies end up on television. That's their life. Whether you like it or not, I don't care how much money you spend on it, or how big or broad the film is, or who the actors are in it, eventually it's all coming out of the box."
"If you're working on a movie, you want it to be projected on the largest tapestry possible, and the sound to be perfect, and for that kind of communal experience of the movies to take place for it."
"Audiences don't ever disappoint me, in the sense that movies I feel really good about, they usually feel really good about too."
"I went door-to-door selling cable television subscriptions when I was in college. Not to date myself, but cable was just coming on. I had terrible territories, and they would give me $25, if I got somebody to let them come and just put the little cord in their house."
"'Little Miss Sunshine' snowballed. It was a tiny movie. We shot it in 30 days, and it was really fun to do, but it was one of those small movies that you don't hold out huge hope for."
"Let's keep the chemists over here and the food over here, that's my feeling. What do I know? But that is a big aspect of fast food is their ability to artificially taint the colors and the smells and stuff to stimulate appetite."
"I have a very well organized closet."
"Cat lovers turn into cat collectors."
"In my sophomore year, a kid told me that the secret to getting women is to play really, really hard to get. I followed his advice, and I didn't have so much as a date that year."
"A man always looks good in a dark suit."
"The tragic element of a character is always intriguing I think."
