“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.”

I haven’t encouraged [Julia Marie Pacino] or discouraged her. I let her go her own way.

That’s where humour lives for me. In the body. The Steve Martin kind of stuff or Jim Carrey, that’s what I like. I’ve always felt that’s what I would like to do.

When [Julia Marie Pacino] was 5 or 6 years old, we were in an Italian restaurant, and these people came by the table and they would start talking to me, asking me for my autograph and she just went under the table.

I was watching Revolution, and the things I did in that picture, holy smokes! I can’t believe I did that, it’s like another person. It’s the thought of it, it’s just appalling to me.

I understand the directors much more. I was always rebelling against them when I was a youngster, I didn’t want to be told what to do. I had no identification.

Shakespeare’s plays are more violent than ‘Scarface.’

The only thing in this world that gives orders is balls.

Many years ago, in the late ’70s, I toured colleges along the East Coast and I presented a kind of show where I got a lot of books and poetry and pieces of [William] Shakespeare and other writers that I admire.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete.

I’m more comfortable in a play. In film, there’s always a certain sense of control, of holding back.

Sometimes you feel critics are wrong all the time, but I don ‘t take objection to it, because that’s the way it goes. They can be wrong, they can be right. They can be cruel, they can be kind.

When you perform with a live audience, the audience comes back to you.

Really, I didn’t know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother.

I try to get some friends together and read a script aloud. Sometimes I read scripts and record them and play them back to see if there’s a movie.

If you can identify with people, you can empathize with people and therefore you understand things.

Sometimes the only way you can get an audience is at an audition.