“There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare’s.”

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.

You don’t get to know anybody in a movie until after it’s over. You work less together in a film than you do onstage.

sometimes it’s better to be with the devil u know than the angel u didn’t know

You could almost call them marriages, even though I didn’t marry. But it was costly.

That’s the way to live – around people who care. It may be a tough ride, but something is going to come out of it.

Brian De Palma, standing there alone by the surf and they were all waiting for him. And I never forgot that because it represented to me what a director is, what a director does.

I used to think of myself as a comedian. I’ve always admired comedians.

I love work because it keeps sex in perspective. Otherwise, it can become a preoccupation.

I’ve often gotten the feeling that the only people who have learned from computer assisted instruction are the authors.

You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it!

Well yeah, there’s definitely going to be a little bit of the author in that. But there’s nothing wrong with that.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.

Shakespeare feels very natural to me.

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts.

The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.

Socrates said, our only knowledge was “To know that nothing could be known;” a pleasant Science enough, which levels to an ass Each Man of Wisdom, future, past, or present.