“There was once a great actor named George C. Scott. He was on stage in the Delacourt Theater in Central Park, where they do Shakespeare every summer, and he was playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.”

I’m much more a European Italian than I am an American Italian, and I’ve always felt that that style of acting comedy is in me.

Vanity: my favorite sin.

What he does with it, that’s something else, but he’s got it all. The talent, the instrument is there, that’s why he has endured.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I just had a kind of energy, I was a fairly happy kid.

The literal, basic thing of the stage is really like a magnet. It brings me back to earth.

I used to say I wanted to genuflect to a woman, put her up on a pedestal higher and higher, way up beyond my grasp…Then I’d find another one.

I haven’t encouraged [Julia Marie Pacino] or discouraged her. I let her go her own way.

That’s where humour lives for me. In the body. The Steve Martin kind of stuff or Jim Carrey, that’s what I like. I’ve always felt that’s what I would like to do.

When [Julia Marie Pacino] was 5 or 6 years old, we were in an Italian restaurant, and these people came by the table and they would start talking to me, asking me for my autograph and she just went under the table.

I was watching Revolution, and the things I did in that picture, holy smokes! I can’t believe I did that, it’s like another person. It’s the thought of it, it’s just appalling to me.

I understand the directors much more. I was always rebelling against them when I was a youngster, I didn’t want to be told what to do. I had no identification.

Shakespeare’s plays are more violent than ‘Scarface.’

The only thing in this world that gives orders is balls.

Many years ago, in the late ’70s, I toured colleges along the East Coast and I presented a kind of show where I got a lot of books and poetry and pieces of [William] Shakespeare and other writers that I admire.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete.

I’m more comfortable in a play. In film, there’s always a certain sense of control, of holding back.

Different people call on [God] by different names: some as Allah, some as God, and others as Krishna, Siva, and Brahman. It is like the water in a lake.

I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

Everywhere do I percieve a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage underthat name and pretext of commonwealth.

Reality is always the foe of famous names.

Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

The works which this man [Joseph Banks] leaves behind him occupy a few pages only; their importance is not greatly superior to their extent; and yet his name will shine out with lustre in the history of the sciences.

What name to call thee by, O virgin fair, I know not, for thy looks are not of earth And more than mortal seems thy countenances.

Let a thing here be noted, that the prophet of God sometimes may teach treason against kings, and yet neither he nor such as obey the word, spoken in the Lord’s name by him, offend God.