“I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text, the script and become him. It’s almost like a painter having a model to become.”

I want to be interesting in an interview just as much as I want to do well in a part.

You’re going to get a sense of what the hell’s going on there. Boy, you’ll wake up fast when bullets are flying over your head.

[Salomaybe] is my presentation, my vision of the world. Not so much to satisfy the audience at large.

“To be or not to be is” [by William Shakespeare] beyond anything I can comprehend.

Acting is hard work. At times, it’s very energizing and enervating.

I’ ve won awards. And they didn’t make me feel bad winning them.

I’ve been a lavatory attendant, a theatre usher, a panhandler, all for real. Now, as an actor, I can be a journalist today and a brain surgeon tomorrow. That’s the stuff my dreams are made of.

I’m constantly striving to break through to something new.

Playing a character is an illusion, and I feel that when you know too much about a person, possibly part of that illusion is disrupted.

I’m naturally shy but I’ve done this [movie Salomaybe] so much and you get better at it than you would think.

There has been a lot of self-doubt and unwelcome events in my life.

The play will invariably be different and stronger, and much more fulfilling and richer on all counts. There’s no doubt in my mind about it.

Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions.

I don’t like what’s going on in Iraq, naturally. I’m part of a large majority of people who don’t, but I do not know the whole story.

My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman.

I can see [ talent or curiosity for acting] in my oldest daughter [Julia Marie Pacino]. I don’t know how long she’ll run away from it, but it’s there in her.

I love to be busy and be challenged. I’m my happiest when I’m under pressure and almost overwhelmed by how much I have to get done.

I do not actually DO these things, but I see myself doing them, and that is almost MORE satisfying, because I am also lying down.

I wish I could say I’m an architect and planned it this way, foresaw doing all these things, but honestly, I’ve been lucky that things have come across my path and they’ve worked out well for me.

When I grew up in the ’70s I thought you had to take drugs. It was almost like I didn’t think you had a choice.

What’s interesting to me is drama and conflict. Things aren’t interesting without conflict and resolution of conflict – or striving towards a resolutions of conflict.

I don’t. I almost never get in shape for a movie, even though I know it would be a good career move.

I wanted to be more hands on. Otherwise, every time you finish acting in a movie you have to almost go and beg people for the next job.

Readers are made by readers – it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.