“I had it on scraps of paper and the maid threw it out.”

Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God… and where can you go from there?

It would be hard to play a character you don’t like – for me anyway – or can’t find something in them to like.

I don’t talk politics and I don’t talk philosophy or anything like that, but if you look at my work, you might get an expression of me as a person.

Certainly the movies were always in the air for me. I come from the era when actors thought it was a big deal to be in the movies.

I’m an actor, not a star. Stars are people who live in Hollywood and have heart-shaped swimming pools.

I once asked my oldest daughter [Julia Marie] if she thought about changing her name in school and she said, “No, I’m a Pacino. That’s my name.”

I had these little babies [my twins] and it gave me something so spectacular, such a feeling – I was so turned on and so excited by them that I wrote a poem.

When you’re acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back.

What’s this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?

All due respect and trying to be as modest as I can be,

I like women who can cook. That’s first. Love is very important, but you’ve got to have a friend first.

I don’t see my Oscar much now. But when I first got it, there was a feeling for weeks afterward that I guess is akin to winning a gold medal in the Olympics.

So that you and the audience are giving to each other, in a sense. It’s an extraordinary thing. It’s wild turf up there.

I went back to the stage because it was my way of dealing with the success I had, my way of coping.

The fruit falls off the tree. You don’t shake it off before it’s ready to fall.

I understand it on a superficial level, but the depth of it just boggles my mind. I think it’s probably the greatest of all speeches ever written.

In Hollywood through the 50s, there were black, English, and Middle European housekeepers and maids.

My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier, a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.

The Maid and her soldiers will have the victory. Therefore the Maid is willing that you, Duke of Bedford, should not destroy yourself.

Her [Mary’s] motherhood extends beyond view. In the will of the Son, she becomes at once mother and maid: sheltering him, but sheltered in him, forming him, but formed by him …

So a maiden, whilst she remains untouched, so long is she dear to her own; when she has lost her chaste flower with sullied body, she remains neither lovely to boys nor dear to girls.

Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman’s destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

There’s nothing my housekeeper does that I can’t do – and maybe better!