“They say we die twice – once when the last breath leaves our body and once when the last person we know says our name.”

We were doing Scarface many years ago…and I remember having my coffee and looking at the beach, the surf, and I saw a hundred people looking out into the ocean.

I found out how temperamental I am, yes. And that sometimes that can be kind of off-putting.

My grandfather was a provider. Work, any kind of work, was the joy of his life.

I’m so shy now I wear sunglasses everywhere I go.

The problem with me is, I guess, the way I express myself, you have to be with me 50 years before you can get a sense of what I’m talking about.

I don’t think actors should ever expect to get a role, because the disappointment is too great.

Is it possible to do something that that makes an audience uncomfortable, challenges them, makes them see things they’re not used to?

Show me a bad script and I will show you a big payday.

Shakespeare is one of the reasons I’ve stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words.

I’ve often said there’s two kinds of actors. There’s a more gregarious type and the shy type.

There was a time in my life when being dishonest with women was the natural way to be. I finally said, “Hey, I have to stop this silliness.”

They made me feel pretty good. But it also did not make me feel bad NOT winning the Academy Award.

The truth is, you know, we need our anodynes. You know that word, anodynes? We need that in life some times.

Responsibilities are relative. My responsibility is to a character in a script, to a part I’m playing.

You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse.

Did you know I started out as a stand-up comic? People don’t believe me when I tell them. That’s how I saw myself, in comedy.

There are people who are born and die and never once are aware of their breath going in and out of their body. That’s how far away they live from themselves

Time is our present breath.

We can always find time to breathe. In the same way, if we see the importance of meditation practice we will find the time to practice.

Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.

In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it’s the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple

When I feel myself getting overwhelmed, I take a deep breath and eat a piece of chocolate.

the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.