“To me, growing old is great. It’s the very best thing – considering the alternative.”

I’m not in the Lifetime Achievement area yet-I’m still battling it out in the trenches.

My most useful acting tip came from my pal John Wayne. Talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much.

There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.

A man’s body may grow old, but inside his spirit can still be as young and as restless as ever.

I’ve never been out with a married woman, never. I respect others’ properties.

For all my education, accomplishments, and so called ‘wisdom’… I can’t fathom my own heart.

There’s quite a lot of bad stuff written about me. My wife even says a lot of bad stuff about me. But she is wonderful.

I was so poor for so long that I didn’t use anything. I didn’t drive cars, I didn’t eat very much. So, I figured the world owed me a debt, so I’ve been eating very well and have had a very big car for a long time. But I still haven’t caught up with my youth.

I’ve always loved reprehensible people because they’re so much more interesting to play on screen.

I have a knack of making villainous people a little bit sympathetic, a bit of fun on screen.

What a lot of people dont realize about gangs, in my opinion, is that a gang is not there to attack you. Eighty percent of the people in a gang are there to stop anyone from attacking them. You join a gang for protection, not to go out and hit someone.

At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I’m Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim.

I’m looking for me to disappear, and the acting to disappear, and all you see is a real person.

About Superman and Batman: the former is how America views itself, the latter, darker character is how the rest of the world views America.

I enjoy making people laugh. The trick is to tell them jokes against yourself. If you praise yourself, your stories aren’t funny.

If you’re a movie actor, you’re on your own – you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.

You realize as a director that when you are cutting a film, you want to have alternatives. You need color and choices. You don’t want four takes that are identical.

I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.

There is no alternative to success. So stop thinking you should already be there.

The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.

Government “planning” is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people’s plans.

When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves for their failure or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves.

Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.