“My children can make me feel rejected. They can humble you pretty quick.”

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.

There’s so much there, there’s so much to heal for.

The game embarrasses you until you feel inadequate.

The only two things in life that make it worth livin’ / Is guitars that tune good and firm feelin’ women

The more time i spent with him, the more i knew the feelings weren’t going away.

I feel as passionate as when I was 13 years old and just released my first album. I feel the same amount of adrenaline in my blood, and the same amount of curiosity as well. Curiosity about why I’m different.

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.

To me one of the amazing technologies of writing is the way it can listen in on thoughts. I don’t feel that that’s natural to other art forms in the same way.

Love and despair go hand in hand.