“Did you know I started out as a stand-up comic? People don’t believe me when I tell them. That’s how I saw myself, in comedy.”

In America most everybody who’s Italian is half Italian. Except me. I’m all Italian. I’m mostly Sicilian, and I have a little bit of Neapolitan in me. You get your full dose with me.

If you have the opportunity to meet someone as an actor, it’s just great fodder for you. It’s wonderful source stuff that we die for.

When you do these things, you sort of take the journey. The journey is all about how I can interweave the Oscar Wilde story.

It was a way of escaping the responsibilty of what was happening.

You’re in a conversation and everybody’s agreeing with what you’re saying – even if you say something totally crazy. You need people who can tell you what you don’t want to hear.

Failure’s relative. I’ve always felt, even early on, if I lose the freedom to fail, something’s not right about that. It’s how you treat failure, too.

Actors are always outsiders. It’s necessary to be able to interpret – and that gets distorted when you become famous.

The interesting thing about this is I don’t know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about.

If you get all tangled up, just tango on.

You take a guy like George Clooney who goes out there to Darfur, and gets things done! That’s magical. He’s done a great thing.

Jamie Foxx does a good rendition of me. It’s a real gift, mimicry of that kind, the tonal thing. It’s sort of like having a talent for playing an instrument.

You don’t get to know anybody in a movie until after it’s over. You work less together in a film than you do onstage.

sometimes it’s better to be with the devil u know than the angel u didn’t know

You could almost call them marriages, even though I didn’t marry. But it was costly.

That’s the way to live – around people who care. It may be a tough ride, but something is going to come out of it.

Brian De Palma, standing there alone by the surf and they were all waiting for him. And I never forgot that because it represented to me what a director is, what a director does.

I would draw my own comic book characters listening to metal. The drawing and music kind of went hand in hand.

There are two kinds of comics; there are the ones who build bridges, and then there are the people who walk across the bridges as though they built them. The bridge builders are few and far between.

There have been times when I played more than others, but I’ve been a road comic for a quarter of a century, so I’ve always played golf on the road because you have a lot of time to kill.

If you look at the common denominator of all the comics who have had big success, it’s being true to their nature… that’s what takes a long time to learn.

I see myself as a comic but the acting helps sell tickets for gigs.

I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

Seriously, if you want to get inside the head of a stand-up comic, you could do a lot worse than reading Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up.