Quotes from Michael Emerson

The 'Lost' style book is really quite set. We do things like, we walk through the jungle, and we stop and turn and talk to each other. We never talk and walk. We always stop to talk.

I have had some good fortune in the world of television. I have had it late in life after many youthful struggles and a change of careers.

I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.

I'd really like to play a character who's inarticulate. I always play people with language. It would be good to play a mute or a fool or a saint.

I like shooting on location in New York City.

I had started out my grown-up life in New York City, but I couldn't figure out how to be an actor there. And so I had been a magazine illustrator instead.

I liked dark, urban stories like 'Peter Gunn,' which was a detective series on network TV when I was a little boy. I grew up in a farmtown in the Midwest where not much exciting happened. I liked the idea of lives lived at night and the shadowy characters who lived in that demi-monde.

I was a housepainter and a landscape nursery man, and all these various odd jobs I had, and started doing community theater.

I've played villains on stage - you know, the Iagos and so on - but I think of myself as a funny person. I mostly did comedies before I did TV work.

I'm truly glad there are so many options on television that are for grown and thinking people.

I'm very proud of my New York debut. I played Oscar Wilde in 'Gross Indecency' off Broadway in about 1997. And I was very proud of my Broadway debut in 'The Iceman Cometh.'

So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we're going to work through these.

So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.

'Elementary' is a strong show; we watch it almost religiously in our house.

In a way, 'Lost,' or maybe TV in general, is a kind of a contract between the writers and the viewers. And the actors - of course we have a great deal to do with it - but where the drama's made, sort of where the meeting of minds is, is between those two parties: writers and audience.

I've been blessed by doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever.