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

I’ve always been a bit squeamish when it came to that kind of thing.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful – my personal life suffers.

“What was that, George, what were you doing?” And he said, “They were sleeping.” You’re always trying to catch them.

I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it,

I think what you see [in Salome the play backstage] is an artist having this fit of temperament.

After looking at Salomaybe, I don’t know who the hell the real me is. I think it’s closest now to the real me because for one thing, I’m used to this.

When I was younger, there was the sex thing. That’s par for the course.When you’re a movie star, it went with it. It’s a kind of rite of passage, socially.

[Ocean’s Thirteen] is a great group, and it was an opportunity to work with Steven Soderbergh. But mainly? It was shot in L.A. and I want to be next to my kids.

I come from the South Bronx – a true descendant of the melting pot. I grew up in a really mixed neighborhood; it was a very integrated life.

It’s childish. It’s also responsible. It’s illuminating, enriching, joyful, drab. It’s bizarre, diabolical. It’s exciting.

My first language was shy. It’s only by having been thrust into the limelight that I have learned to cope with my shyness.

I was quite overtaken by success and fame. I was one of those types who responded to it in a negative way. It was not easy.

When I was younger, I would go to auditions to have the opportunity to audition, which would mean another chance to get up there and try out my stuff.

Be careful how you judge people, most of all friends. You don’t sum up a man’s life in one moment.

Our life is looking forward or looking back, that’s it. Where is the moment?

And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.

I was never a dancer before ‘Shake It Up’.

Certainly the life of a dancer is very difficult. The training is very hard and relentlessly grueling.

I’ve never danced professionally as a ballet dancer, but all of my training is ballet, and I am a Fosse dancer.

I can act. I can sing. But I am a dancer

If haters hadn’t made me angry and made me practice, I wouldn’t have gotten this good.

It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.

I was a street dancer.

They shouldn’t make the departure of a dancer so tear jerky because nobody’s going to war.