“The problem with me is, I guess, the way I express myself, you have to be with me 50 years before you can get a sense of what I’m talking about.”

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.

If you can identify with people, you can empathize with people and therefore you understand things.

Sometimes the only way you can get an audience is at an audition.

The reasons you have for doing a movie will vary with the way your life is going. There was a time when a made a some movies because I felt I needed to work.

There are many things my father taught me here in this room. He taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

There was once a great actor named George C. Scott. He was on stage in the Delacourt Theater in Central Park, where they do Shakespeare every summer, and he was playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

When I was doing ‘Scarface,’ I remember being in love at that time. One of the few times in my life. And I was so glad it was at that time.

I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.

My weaknesses… I wish I could come up with something.

If I find something and feel as though I can contribute to [it] in a way and feel I’m in it, whatever that means.

My movies are always being played on television, I’m very well known and all that stuff.

When you’re reading some of the great plays, when you do what I call “taking up with a writer,” something happens.

I’m not a violent person, never was, but I have this temperament that I’ve always displayed.

I never saw myself as a director. It’s certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

[Marlon] Brando’s a giant on every level. When he acts it’s as if he landed from another planet. A planet where they produce great actors.

I don’t need bodyguards. I’m from the South Bronx.

Being a good actor isn’t easy. Being a man is even harder. I want to be both before I’m done.

I don’t know what happened. I just exploded. I’d never sung like that before. I used to stand still and sing simple, but you can’t sing like that in front of a rock band.

Imagine a limitless expanse of water: above and below, before and behind, right and left, everywhere there is water. In that water is placed a jar filled with water.

To my way of thinking, an actor’s course is set even before he’s out of the cradle.

Lying is before you and the grave is in front of you.

No. One. Comes. Before You.

A lot of people kind of want to wait until you’re off a show before they book you into a movie.

I think that Ruth Bader Ginsburg needs, like, a pump-up. And I think Jock Jams is a classic pump-up. Like before she starts working, she needs that.