“I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.”

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.

Sometimes you feel critics are wrong all the time, but I don ‘t take objection to it, because that’s the way it goes. They can be wrong, they can be right. They can be cruel, they can be kind.

When you perform with a live audience, the audience comes back to you.

Really, I didn’t know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother.

I try to get some friends together and read a script aloud. Sometimes I read scripts and record them and play them back to see if there’s a movie.

You can’t beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don’t even try to.

What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself holding such things shameful to be spoken about.

And sure enough, even waiting will end…if you can just wait long enough.

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.