Dallas Roberts quotes:

If you're into a leather-jacketed crime fighter and his artificially intelligent robotic supercar, tune into 'The Good Wife.' If, on the other hand, you prefer the misadventures of a freelance itinerant trucker and his simian sidekick, check out 'The Walking Dead.' Or DVR them both and go talk to your family.

Like all kids who want to be in action movies, I want to jump out of a speeding car, shoot guns, slide out the side in slow motion like a John Woo movie.

I've been a fan since I was a kid of that sort of bump-in-the-night stuff. I don't tend to go in too much for the slash-and-burn-'em or the walker kills on 'The Walking Dead.' That stuff's not necessarily the stuff that frightens me or gets me going. It's more the terror of waiting, the thriller aspects, that I find compelling.

I came up in the theater, and I learned pretty quickly that reading a review, whether it's good or bad, can strangely affect the next performances, because you're reacting to something that's been said about you. So I tend to avoid that stuff pretty studiously.

I never have been a coder, outside of when I was twelve or something, like on the Atari 1200 XP or whatever I had.

In the acting community in New York we call 'Law & Order' 'grad school,' because everyone eventually does a 'Law & Order.' My first one was in 1995, which was a year after I got out of school. Matthew Blanchard was the character's name.

Luckily, what you trade off in not being part of the comic book canon and not having some literature that you can use to your benefit, in terms of figuring out who you are, you gain in the ability to just be whoever you want to be.

I find that on serialized television it's wiser to hit the ground and look forward, and take the cues from the writers and the events happening, otherwise you just tie yourself in knots.

I was a crazy Pee-wee Herman fan when I was in my early teens. Before he had the kids' TV show, he had a nightclub show in L.A., and I had gotten a VHS copy of it. It was a kids' show, but onstage in a bar, so it's sort of poking fun at the kids' show. And I was obsessed with that, and then 'Pee-wee's Big Adventure.'

I'm attracted to good writing. When I read the page and I know what we're after and where we're headed, and I'm fortunate enough to respect that idea and am able to pitch myself toward that, that feels like the culmination of everything that I've spent my life trying to do, since I played that tree in that play in third grade.

When you get a job on 'The Walking Dead' you imagine you're going to be running through the woods with a lot of weaponry shouting, 'Look out!'

I'm from Houston. I think I was thirty-seven before I ever set foot in Dallas, and that was just in the airport. So I've never really been there. Dad grew up in Port Arthur, Texas and all I can ever get out of him is, 'I wanted my first son to be named Dallas.'

I enjoy playing someone who doesn't show up and say, 'This is what I am, and this is what I'm about,' but is someone who, four hours in, makes you go, 'Really? Is that what's going on?'

The notion of being on a cop show was appealing, just because it's one of those tick boxes in a career.

I remember walking out in front of that crowd, all the parents' faces and the applause, and folding my little self in half and thinking, 'I could get used to this.' And I just never stopped.

I try my damnedest to quirk up anything that Im in.

It can be annoying not to know who you are, where you came from, or what you're doing. To try to create a character without a whole lot of information can be taxing.

I remember walking out in front of that crowd, all the parents faces and the applause, and folding my little self in half and thinking, I could get used to this. And I just never stopped.

Once the audience has to use themselves to cross the distance to the character, that's what's really exciting. That's when it starts to be a discussion between the art form and the audience, and that's fun stuff.

There's this notion that actors choose their career. After a certain level, I think that that's true. I still take way more jobs than I turn down, and the reason that I turn down a job is that I just can't find anything in it that charges me or excites me or challenges me about moving to the next phase of where I'm headed.