RAINN WILSON

I know what I look like - a weird, sad clown puppet. I'm fine with that.

Life is suffering. Life is not resistance to suffering. The point of life is to suffer. This is why we're here: We're here to suffer. I believe in a higher power that compassionately allows suffering for us as a race, to grow and mature.

My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet.

Some of the most morally conscious, kindest, most compassionate people are in the entertainment industry, people who want to affect the world and make it a better place through telling human, heartfelt stories.

Music is universal too. Even deaf people like to dance, love rhythm, and can kind of pick it up.

The founder of the Mona Foundation actually knew my dad for years, and the more I learned about it, the more I realized I really found the perfect charity. It sponsors schools and educational initiatives all over the planet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would definitely be my homeboy.

The bonds we create in the household are the most important and lasting. Savor them; they're sacred.

I think we're the only jokeless show on television. I mean really, we have no setups and no punch lines. It's not a joke show. There are funny lines and funny moments but again the comedy is born of the human experience and awkward pauses are a great part of what it is to be human.

The great thing about 'The Office' and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.

I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books.

I think that charity is a tricky thing, because a lot of times, people equate charity with handouts. I don't believe in handouts.

The great challenge working on this show for me is wearing polyester all day long and having the worst haircut known to man at the top of my head and sitting under fluorescent lights. That is America, people. Polyester, bad haircuts, under fluorescent lights.

And I do believe that the way to change a society, to uplift people - not just their spirit, but to uplift their society and economic base - is through education.

My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.

There was one point in high school actually when I was on the chess team, marching band, model United Nations and debate club all at the same time. And I would spend time with the computer club after school. And I had just quit pottery club, which I was in junior high, but I let that go.

There's like ten minutes when it's like, 'Okay, wait, who is this guy again?' And then, you know, I just put on the calculator watch and the glasses, and just be all, you know, inappropriate. And then it just works out fine.

A guy may wear a suit and have a high-paying job and appear very mature, but essentially, he's a 14-year-old boy.

In every decade rock and roll starts to get very serious and navel gazing and kind of self serious and every once and a while it kind of needs a kick in the pants.

My brain is so anxiety-prone, like a pinball machine. If I don't get up in the morning and focus my thinking, my breathing, and my being for about 12 minutes, I'm just a screwball all day long.

We've seen that there are a lot of people out there - teenagers in Topeka, housewives in Long Island, millionaire Internet start-up moguls - that all want to connect with each other about what it is to be human.

I found it very easy to transform into creeps and weirdos and losers and goof-balls, and I'm happy to play eccentric kinds of characters, and I have a great affinity for the outsider, but I definitely am about expanding my range as well.

I have an eight-year-old child, and I literally can't wrap my mind around the kind of grief that must be felt when you lose a child.

Dwight is a sad clown. You've seen those paintings of sad clown.

I was this weird misfit guy from suburban Seattle, I never really fit in, and then I became a drama geek, among all the other different kinds of geek that I was growing up, and I found I was pretty good at it.