“I try to bring the audience’s own drama – tears and laughter they know about – to them.”

I’m the original take-orders girl.

How strange when an illusion dies. It’s as though you’ve lost a child.

I’ve seen the ticket, and I still can’t believe it. When I see the money, I hope I don’t hit the floor.

If I am a legend, then why am I so lonely?

I was born in a lovely white house with a garden.

To let a fool kiss you is bad. To let a kiss fool you is worse. ‘Twas not my lips you kissed but my soul.

We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.

I can live without money, but I cannot live without love.

I was born at the age of twelve on an MGM lot.

I’ve always taken ‘The Wizard of Oz’ very seriously, you know. I believe in the idea of the rainbow. And I’ve spent my entire life trying to get over it.

Give the people what they want and then go have a hamburger.

When I die I have visions of fags singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ and the flag at Fire Island being flown at half mast.

People en masse have always been wonderful to me. I truly have a great love for an audience. I want to give them two hours of just pow.

Audiences have kept me alive.

When you have lived the life I’ve lived, when you’ve loved and suffered, and been madly happy and desperately sad — well, that’s when you realize you’ll never be able to set it all down. Maybe you’d rather die first.

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.

My favorite job is being a father. I have four girls now. They’re a captive audience.

It was great fun. We had gone on tour in between the sessions and reconnected with the audience and got a lot of energy back from them, a lot of positive energy.

I’d love to knock an audience cold with one note, but what do you do for the rest of the evening?

When I tried to branch out into comedy, I didn’t do very well at it, so I went back to doing what I do naturally well, or what the audience expects from me – action pictures.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

As a hero, you have to play it straight. The audience is going to live through you, so you have to be more neutral. They will be projecting their thoughts and their actions onto the main character.

I mean there’s still also an element of the audience looking for role models. In my day, when I started, if you were an action hero, you were a little bit of a role model like the person.

Cinema is changing every week, and multiplex audiences are demanding every week.