“[Salomaybe] is my presentation, my vision of the world. Not so much to satisfy the audience at large.”

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.

At this point in my career, I don’t have to deal with audition rejections. So I get my rejection from other things.

Great directors can understand the staging in such a way that can make a scene come alive. Others have a certain way of pacing the scene.

Vanity is my favourite sin.

I was playing a part of someone dealing dope on a street corner – and there was a guy actually dealing heroin right there. I looked at him, he looked at me, and I got real confused.

I began to work the stage and get the audience into it. I also learned how to have fun out there. It is something I will never forget.

I never understood the need for a “live” audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.

If a film has a social message, it is very important for me to know what the message is and how it’s going to be delivered, but it’s not something I look for all the time.

Life is not a spectator sport.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.

Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody’s encouraged to want less, you’ll end up with less.

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.