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

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.

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.

See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.

A brave man’s hand can speak for itself, it does not even need a woman’s love to hear its music.

Me as a person, I’m not the president of the NBPA (National Basketball Players Association). I don’t even know what to say. I’m not like this perfect, buttoned-up, suit-and-tie guy.

People are worms, and even the God who created them is immensely bored with their antics.

If you don’t have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don’t know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

There’s something about an American soldier you can’t explain. They’re so grateful for anything, even a film actress coming to see them.

Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.

Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer–both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.