“You spend your life training to be an actor, observing people’s characteristics so that you can design characters around what you’ve seen.”

There are two kinds of people in this world. ‘I’ people and ‘we’ people. I’ve always tried to be a ‘we’ person.

The guys who won World War II and that whole generation have disappeared, and now we have a bunch of teenage twits.

You have to feel confident. If you don’t, then you’re going to be hesitant and defensive, and there’ll be a lot of things working against you.

I mean, I’ve always been a libertarian. Leave everybody alone. Let everybody else do what they want. Just stay out of everybody else’s hair.

Crimes against children are the most heinous crime. That, for me, would be a reason for capital punishment because children are innocent and need the guidance of an adult society.

Whether you like it or not, you’re forced to come to the realisation that death is out there. But I don’t fear death, I’m a fatalist. I believe when it’s your time, that’s it. It’s the hand you’re dealt.

Over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And LIBERTARIANS had more of it. Because what I really believe is, let’s spend a little more time leaving everybody alone.

There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul.

Opinions are like a**holes, everybody has one.

No, I don’t have to practice that grunt. You just do it. Once you’re in character, you’re in character. You don’t sit there purposely thinking, Well, I’ll grunt here, or I’ll groan there.

My wife is my closest friend. Sure, I’m attracted to her in every way possible, but that’s not the answer. Because I’ve been attracted to other people, and I couldn’t stand ’em after a while.

It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.

Go ahead, make my day.

Don Siegel last advice to me was ‘Don’t short yourself.’ He said the tendency is when an actor’s directing is to kind of you want to work on everybody else but you’re going to short yourself. He said, take the time to do a good job with yourself so that you’re satisfied with it.

My father had a couple of kids at the beginning of the Depression. There was not much employment. Not much welfare. People barely got by. People were tougher then.

As you get older you try to do things that please you more. You get a little more selfish. You start thinking I want to do things where I enjoy myself.

I wanted to play incredibly challenging, multifaceted characters. Because we are all a puzzle.

Sometimes it’s the words we choose not to say that speak most loudly about our character.

My gratification in working comes from the preparation and the building of the character.

Character doesn’t matter.

Character is a journey, not a destination.

In this generation, along with the dominating traits, the recessive ones also reappear, their individuality fully revealed, and they do so in the decisively expressed average proportion of 3:1, so that among each four plants of this generation three receive the dominating and one the recessive characteristic.

The role of an actor is to make every character believable.

As many know, the Chinese expression for “crisis” consists of two characters side by side. The first is the symbol for “danger,” the second the symbol for “opportunity.”