“Look, but don’t touch. Touch, but don’t taste. Taste, but don’t swallow.”

Sometimes what we imagine and the world aren’t different things.

I like, for instance, ‘Serpico.’ I enjoyed playing Serpico because Frank Serpico was there. He existed. He was a real life person and I could – I could embody him. I could, you know.

People are always asking me to do Shakespeare – at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It’s like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It’s great therapy.

It’s very evocative; it’s like a first cut because you hear ‘She walked to the door,’ and you visualize all these things. ‘She opens the door’ . . . because you read the stage directions, too.

It surprised me, the feeling I got when I won the Oscar for ‘Scent of a Woman.’ It was a new feeling. I’d never felt it.

I don’t understand the hatred and fear of gays and bisexuals and lesbians… it’s a concept I honestly cannot grasp.

We’re charlatans in a way, we’re magic people. Part of the behind the scenes stuff is to loosen you up, to make you feel that you are experiencing this. This is my style.

That was the first thing I was struck by, not by the acting, not by anything else, but by the physicality.

There are people whose sense of reality is very strong, who have a sense of honesty.

Sometimes you’re fighting corporations and forget that people can talk to each other.

Love is overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate

I personally think if you’re given four months instead of four weeks on a play, with the people who want to work that way.

All due respect, and trying to be as modest as I can be: I am a dancer.

All I am is what I’m going after.

You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is.

In America most everybody who’s Italian is half Italian. Except me. I’m all Italian. I’m mostly Sicilian, and I have a little bit of Neapolitan in me. You get your full dose with me.

Homeopathy – an invention of the Father of Lies! I have tried it and found it wanting. I would swallow their whole doles medicine chest for sixpence, and be sure of finding myself neither better nor worse for it.

We swallow with one gulp the lie that flatters us, and drink drop by drop the truth which is bitter to us.

The more gross the fraud the more glibly will it go down, and the more greedily be swallowed, since folly will always find faith where impostors will find imprudence.

I found it hard work now to pray to God, because despair was swallowing me up.

The Muslim leaders swallow the advice of the Western powers and bodies like the IMF and World Bank, even when it is bad for their countries and they know this.

People can be induced to swallow anything, provided it is sufficiently seasoned with praise.

The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government.

The sea calls to me – she promises to set me free, it’s tempting- losing myself in her vastness allowing her to swallow me whole, beckoning me to make her deep darkness my forever home.