Zach Braff

When you are writing a script, you can’t help but stop and daydream about which actors are going to play the parts, and I kind of imagined Natalie Portman. Not just because she is beautiful, because obviously she is, but she is a wonderful actress who hasn’t had a chance in a long time to show the world how talented she is.

I love Scrubs. It’s the best day job in the world.

I’m kind of jealous of the life I’m supposedly leading.

[On Hollywood’s initial response to his Garden State script] Everyone said no. Everyone with a date book and a phone in Los Angeles said no.

I love “The Office”. I think it’s the funniest thing – Ricky Gervais is possibly the funniest person I’ve seen in my entire life.

I was kosher until I had my Bar Mitzvah, and I parlayed officially becoming a man into telling my father I wanted to eat cheeseburgers.

I am sarcastic and dry, but I also have a pretty huge zest for life.

It’s my nature to downplay.

You don’t waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

But contrary to what some people seem to think, I was never a bully. I was just a hard man.

I was young when I first went to America. I was 19 years old, and I went crazy. I met The GTOs and my mind just snapped. I’m from a nowhere town in the Midlands and here were these girls with bare breasts blatantly coming on, and of course we went crazy.

Okra is the closest thing to nylon I’ve ever eaten. It’s like they bred cotton with a green bean. Okra, tastes like snot. The more you cook it, the more it turns into string.

[on filming Red Eye] I loved the action sequences, running though an airport in heels and all that stuff. That was really fun.

Well, I don’t like the word ‘rock star,’ the two words, ‘rock star.’ Not even ‘soft rock star’. Not even limestone star. I don’t like those words.

So, I think it has to do with the product and what you take to the public. If they like it, they’re going to come see you, and if they don’t, and if you’re kind of getting out of the trendy line of things, then they won’t come see you.

Very rarely artists come in on their own terms and get to do everything – whatever they want…it doesn’t really matter about talent in the beginning. Talent is what keeps you here, getting in the door is just about how you start in the music business.

I’m not always the first person to run out and see something I’m in. I don’t know; for me, that’s not why I did it. I did it because I wanted to act. I don’t really think about the end result. I don’t feel like I have to see it – for me, it already happened.

I also went to art school and learned to play a piano there, but I play by ear.

The first album I ever got was “Like a Virgin”. It was during the Iran Contra conflict-I thought she was saying, “Like a Persian”.

The good Lord doesn’t tell you what His plan is, so all you can do is get up in the morning and see what happens next.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual with the successful one is a lot of hard work.