“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.”

I personally think if you’re given four months instead of four weeks on a play, with the people who want to work that way.

All due respect, and trying to be as modest as I can be: I am a dancer.

All I am is what I’m going after.

You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is.

In America most everybody who’s Italian is half Italian. Except me. I’m all Italian. I’m mostly Sicilian, and I have a little bit of Neapolitan in me. You get your full dose with me.

If you have the opportunity to meet someone as an actor, it’s just great fodder for you. It’s wonderful source stuff that we die for.

When you do these things, you sort of take the journey. The journey is all about how I can interweave the Oscar Wilde story.

It was a way of escaping the responsibilty of what was happening.

You’re in a conversation and everybody’s agreeing with what you’re saying – even if you say something totally crazy. You need people who can tell you what you don’t want to hear.

Failure’s relative. I’ve always felt, even early on, if I lose the freedom to fail, something’s not right about that. It’s how you treat failure, too.

Actors are always outsiders. It’s necessary to be able to interpret – and that gets distorted when you become famous.

The interesting thing about this is I don’t know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about.

If you get all tangled up, just tango on.

You take a guy like George Clooney who goes out there to Darfur, and gets things done! That’s magical. He’s done a great thing.

Jamie Foxx does a good rendition of me. It’s a real gift, mimicry of that kind, the tonal thing. It’s sort of like having a talent for playing an instrument.

You don’t get to know anybody in a movie until after it’s over. You work less together in a film than you do onstage.

So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

The highest measure of democracy is neither the ‘extent of freedom’ nor the ‘extent of equality’, but rather the highest measure of participation.

The religions of the world must be assessed, not on the basis of their convoluted theologies, but in terms of the extent to which they serve as forces of liberation and empowerment.

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

Or maybe we’re all self-conscious to an extent.

I think that would have been useful and it would have helped to some extent.

The extent to which YOU take responsibility over something is the extent to which YOU take control over it.

Most people now seem to treasure anything they value in proportion to the extent that it’s followed about and surrounded by the vulgar public.