“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.”

I would come home and she would tell me about her life that day and all her problems and I remember saying to her, look, you really got me through this picture because I would shed everything when I came home.

Sometimes they are the same exact thing.

I put comedy as much as I can into all my movies, if I can help it.

Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God… and where can you go from there?

It would be hard to play a character you don’t like – for me anyway – or can’t find something in them to like.

I don’t talk politics and I don’t talk philosophy or anything like that, but if you look at my work, you might get an expression of me as a person.

Certainly the movies were always in the air for me. I come from the era when actors thought it was a big deal to be in the movies.

I’m an actor, not a star. Stars are people who live in Hollywood and have heart-shaped swimming pools.

I once asked my oldest daughter [Julia Marie] if she thought about changing her name in school and she said, “No, I’m a Pacino. That’s my name.”

I had these little babies [my twins] and it gave me something so spectacular, such a feeling – I was so turned on and so excited by them that I wrote a poem.

When you’re acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back.

What’s this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?

All due respect and trying to be as modest as I can be,

I like women who can cook. That’s first. Love is very important, but you’ve got to have a friend first.

I don’t see my Oscar much now. But when I first got it, there was a feeling for weeks afterward that I guess is akin to winning a gold medal in the Olympics.

So that you and the audience are giving to each other, in a sense. It’s an extraordinary thing. It’s wild turf up there.

Reagan didn’t put anything off the table, if he felt it was for the good of the American people to tweak the tax system.

…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

It is not hard to feel like an outsider. I think we have all felt like that at one time or another.

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.

If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful – my personal life suffers.

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.

This is something I learned only too well years ago when I did a fundraiser for Pol Pot. A few years later I saw ‘The Killing Fields,’ and I’ve got to tell you, I just felt like a schmuck.