VINCENT D'ONOFRIO

People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it.

It's pretty simple, pretty obvious: that people's first impressions of people are really a big mistake.

When you're a child you're able to assimilate so easily into any situation. You even start talking like the people you're around. I wasn't conscious that I was so good at that until I started to truly feel like an actor.

I'm a character actor, and I made a choice when I was young, after 'Mystic Pizza', not to go for the mainstream stuff, and to do a more eclectic kind of route.

So a failed movie is not going to ruin my career.

My partner Dan Ireland wants me to direct, and I read a lot of scripts - some good enough that I could see myself. But then it's like, so what? Who cares? Let someone else direct it.

At our best, it's a good experience but we do 22 episodes a year, so there are some clunkers.

And then, as the years went on, I just kept moving along, busting into doors and getting roles, until I started to actually believe that what these other people were saying was true.

The most fun you can possibly have as an actor is to walk that line between what's real and what's interesting.

I think that being a producer is business and being an actor is art.

To me the definition of true masculinity - and femininity, too - is being able to lay in your own skin comfortably.

The more you are known, the more difficult it is to hide behind characters.

I found my niche as a character actor, and I've never felt like a movie star or teen idol and never wanted to.

All of us are trying to achieve 100 percent in our work. That's all we struggle to do. We never do, but we never stop trying until the day we die. It's that struggle to achieve 100 percent, that's where our performance lies, that's what the audience gets. They get the struggle.

Evil changes everybody!

No, I knew when I was doing theater in New York that this was what I was supposed to be doing.

The minute you start feeling like you've got it down, you know what you're doing, you're dead in the water.

I'll be working the rest of my life because I'm a character actor and don't have to worry about box office.

Like De Niro. He's one of the best character actors we have ever had.

This haunting idea of becoming a celebrity doesn't settle well with me at all.

The search for the truth is not for the faint hearted.

If you try to go beyond your interests just for the sake of pretensions or wealth, your art becomes less legitimate.

I took a route of acting, rather than starmaking, so it cost me a lot financially.

I've never tried to be something I'm not.

Then I did Mystic Pizza, just to do something I wasn't fat in.