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By the time I got to the point where I was 'starring' in movies, and I had executives telling me what lines to say, that wasn't for me. I'm really not an actor. I'm a guy who comes out of comedy, and my impetus was always to rewrite the line to make it funnier, not to try to make somebody's precious words work.

Some say Hollywood movies that are made about boxing are just metaphors for other things, I think I've made one that's actually about boxing and not a metaphor.

If you've ever been around a group of actors, you've noticed, no doubt, that they can talk of nothing else under the sun but acting. It's exactly the same way with baseball players. Your heart must be in your work.

As an actor, you're trained to do the right thing, be politically correct, say your lines, say the right thing about the people you're working with.

There's such a thing, if you're a finance man, as hitting the figures you need to hit. But there's no equivalent in acting. It's a creative field. It's subjective. That's what I love about it.

My fans have always loved my metaphors.

If I'm in a serious play, I often think to myself, 'I could make that line funny.'

I don't like seeing myself on television and I don't enjoy filming. What I actually enjoy is thinking about how I am going to express something or how we are going to make the visual metaphor.

Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic.

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.