“Is it possible to do something that that makes an audience uncomfortable, challenges them, makes them see things they’re not used to?”

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.

If you have the opportunity to meet someone as an actor, it’s just great fodder for you. It’s wonderful source stuff that we die for.

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.

Everyone seems to have internalized the fact that you can say anything you want at a televised debate, and only a tiny fraction of the audience will ever see a fact-check. So why not claim the moon is square?

But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of communication with an audience. That’s why I call it the most social of the various art forms.

I always want to win because I never want to sit out on the sidelines outside.

It’s kind of a hybrid, half movie, half play, presented in a proscenium fashion – the camera’s on one side of the line, the set on the other, the audience sitting behind the cameras.

Sometimes when I perform, and it’s obvious the audience is just there to party, or if I feel a wall between me and the audience, I get existential about it.

I think the pressure gets to me when I play shows and there’s more people in the audience than I’m used to.

That really is my trademark. Day to day, week in, week out. If something happens and the crowd roars, I shut up.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?’