“I don’t like a lot of things like [Iraq], I never did. Being in a position of celebrity and having your words carry such unnatural weight…”

You try to maintain a neutral approach to your work, and not be too hard on yourself.

You need some insecurity if you’re an actor. It keeps the pot boiling. I haven’t yet started to think about retiring.

I’d probably have the same pause if you asked me what my strengths are. Maybe they’re the same thing.

It was a compromise. There was a sense that I could write my own memoirs, and Larry [Grobel] would help me down the line, or maybe not, maybe he was too close to me.

I probably write a poem every 50 years.

I’m an actor, and everything about me – the way I perceive things, the way I have seen the world – has been in relation to characters and how I would want to play something or not play it.

My early career was a real rush of movies and stardom – it was almost overwhelming.

I’m expressing something that I feel is a way to exercise my talent and help communicate a role as a human being in a movie, I will do that.

I wouldn’t be interested in [nowadays] television simply because I think it goes too fast.

Romantic love can be a lot of crap, though, let me tell you. And it can hurt you.

I want to be a great actor someday, and I’ve decided there’s no use philosophizing; the only way is to work at my craft.

I learned to wrestle, I learned defensive fighting at a young age, because when someone hit me, I would throw up and fall down.

You’ve got to think of things as an opportunity. An audition’s an opportunity to have an audience.

Freedom, baby, is never having to say youre sorry.

To me, it’s not who you love… a man, a woman, what have you… it’s the fact that you love. That is all that truly matters.

Being the actors of the craft, the trade, one of the big things you do and you learn is about repeating.

I’m sort of always trying to reinvent and recreate a better way of being.

The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it.

Of being able to get up and go wherever and whenever you want. That’s invaluable.

Human beings are spirits. Being a human being is one of the ways of being a spirit.

Nothing juices me up creatively like being in my own studio for an extended period.

To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares

I like being challenged.

It is the contact with great masses of people who are seeking fir the moment only well-being and not salvation that weakens and devalues the indigenous population.