“Romantic love can be a lot of crap, though, let me tell you. And it can hurt you.”

When you’re reading some of the great plays, when you do what I call “taking up with a writer,” something happens.

I’m not a violent person, never was, but I have this temperament that I’ve always displayed.

I never saw myself as a director. It’s certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

[Marlon] Brando’s a giant on every level. When he acts it’s as if he landed from another planet. A planet where they produce great actors.

I don’t need bodyguards. I’m from the South Bronx.

If something is working, don’t fix it. Keep going. Go with the glow.

Or try out what I learned and see how it worked with an audience, because where are you gonna get an audience?

I’m always on a red carpet . . . the other day I thought, this ain’t bad. You can meet people on it.

I would say I am more concerned with the plays I’m going to do than the movies.

I don’t care if it’s a walk in the park, a look out the window, a good bubble bath – whatever. Even a meal you like, or a friend you want to call. That helps us solve all this stuff in our head.

Larry Grobel has the illness of all writers, he can’t help himself.

I just wondered how it would feel, how people would treat her, but she’s adjusted so marvelously.

I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text, the script and become him. It’s almost like a painter having a model to become.

A good warm bath can be one for you, or a whatever.

I thought it was time to show some of it, to show some of my feelings about things and what I preferred at the time. I prefer them still but not to the extent I did at the time.

When I was a younger actor, I would try to keep it serious all day. But I have found, later on, that the lighter I am about things when I’m going to do a big scene that’s dramatic and takes a lot out of you, the better off I am when I come to it.

You know, I spend most of my life turning things down. There’s a lot of crap out there.

I can’t begin to describe the amount of crap I’ve taken for being a lousy free-throw shooter.

I have the greatest job in the world. I get paid loads of cash for beating the crap out of people. And I’m very good at it.

Keep writing. Try to do a little bit every day, even if the result looks like crap.

So if I’m swirling around on some wires, talking to Fred Flintstone, I make it the funnest I can. I also want to be good at it. I don’t want to be a crap cartoon character. I want to be proud I’m a vitamin!

My mother was an avid readerShe loved books about romance.

I don’t use a crap camera, I don’t eat junk, and I’m not going to a dance where the boys are bores.

Everything government touches turns to crap.