“My understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasures.”

It’s much harder to act in a bad film than in a good one. A terrible script makes for very difficult acting. You can win an Academy Award for some of the easiest acting in your career, made possible by a brilliant script.

Use the difficulties – if you can’t avoid them

I read books like mad, but I am careful to to let anything I read influence me.

When you reach the top, that’s when the climb begins.

I don’t have any regrets because I’m very optimistic, and live each day as though it’s the last.

It’s vital to have your own space so you aren’t constantly in each other’s pockets.

I’m every bourgeois nightmare – a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.

I did everything. I ran my life exactly as I wanted to, all the time. I never listened to anybody. I’m pig-headed.

You start pretending to have fun, you might have a little by accident.

I don’t think human beings are bad. They’re weak. And that’s what makes ’em bad.

Do I believe in God? Yes I do. When you’ve had a life like mine, you have to.

Funny things happen to you in movies for silly reasons.

As an actor, my attitude towards using of film versus digital is, if you have film, filmmakers have to cut eventually so you don’t have to learn all that dialogue. With digital, they can just go on forever and it’s a nightmare. So, I like film – nice short takes.

Don’t sit as if you have nothing to say. You should be bursting with things to say. You just choose at this particular place and time, not to say them.

I’m the audience’s representative on earth.

Do you know that the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? Nothing that has meaning is easy,”Easy” doesn’t enter into grown-up life.

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

Who hateth me but for my happiness? Or who is honored now but for his wealth? Rather had I, a Jew, be hated thus, Than pitied in a Christian poverty.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

I tend to follow a scattershot approach to reading a lot of very diverse subjects interest me, and I’m quite happy to read stuff on any of them.

Again rejoicing Nature sees Her robe assume its vernal hues Her leafy locks wave in the breeze, All freshly steep’d in the morning dews.

Learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is that. Note what the great men admired; they admired great things; narrow spirits admire basely, and worship meanly.