“There’s something to learn from it. I’ve had movies that have failed colossally, so you kind of analyze your failures.”

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.

The reasons you have for doing a movie will vary with the way your life is going. There was a time when a made a some movies because I felt I needed to work.

There are many things my father taught me here in this room. He taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

There was once a great actor named George C. Scott. He was on stage in the Delacourt Theater in Central Park, where they do Shakespeare every summer, and he was playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

When I was doing ‘Scarface,’ I remember being in love at that time. One of the few times in my life. And I was so glad it was at that time.

I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.

My weaknesses… I wish I could come up with something.

If I find something and feel as though I can contribute to [it] in a way and feel I’m in it, whatever that means.

In the last analysis, the welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or social morality which in any way lessens initiative is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers.

When I started analysing games in 2001, I had a DVD recorder.

So I know at the beginning of the race, from all that I have analysed during the practice, whether I will win the race or not.

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.

Every action analysed and every responsibility assigned by an organisation chart.

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.

It’s time for reflection, time to analyse the ups and downs because critical thinking is the only way to improve.