“My early career was a real rush of movies and stardom – it was almost overwhelming.”

People are always asking me to do Shakespeare – at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It’s like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It’s great therapy.

It’s very evocative; it’s like a first cut because you hear ‘She walked to the door,’ and you visualize all these things. ‘She opens the door’ . . . because you read the stage directions, too.

It surprised me, the feeling I got when I won the Oscar for ‘Scent of a Woman.’ It was a new feeling. I’d never felt it.

I don’t understand the hatred and fear of gays and bisexuals and lesbians… it’s a concept I honestly cannot grasp.

We’re charlatans in a way, we’re magic people. Part of the behind the scenes stuff is to loosen you up, to make you feel that you are experiencing this. This is my style.

That was the first thing I was struck by, not by the acting, not by anything else, but by the physicality.

There are people whose sense of reality is very strong, who have a sense of honesty.

Sometimes you’re fighting corporations and forget that people can talk to each other.

Love is overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate

I personally think if you’re given four months instead of four weeks on a play, with the people who want to work that way.

All due respect, and trying to be as modest as I can be: I am a dancer.

All I am is what I’m going after.

You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is.

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.

Almost no one has studied health.

…Almost everything inside was filled with sugar, cheese, and weight-loss tips.

Sometimes you’ll put something in and it will just die so hard that it’ll almost kill the movie.

I will never forget the love we almost had.

Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.

I am terrified that I am destined for almost.

We’ve only recently turned the corner on the Sept. 11 attacks being blamed on Jews and Israelis, as well as almost every other terrorist attack, whether in London, Madrid, Bali or Egypt.

Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World