“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.”

Love is overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate

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.

The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.

I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.

We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.

Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

What’s good about writing is that when you write novels or fiction, people can see that the problems in one region are similar to problems in another region.

One man’s wage increase is another man’s price increase.

We are not retreating – we are advancing in another direction.

The dimmed outlines of phenomenal things all merge into one another unless we put on the focusing-glass of theory, and screw it up sometimes to one pitch of definition and sometimes to another, so as to see down into different depths through the great millstone of the world.