“I probably write a poem every 50 years.”

You’re going to get a sense of what the hell’s going on there. Boy, you’ll wake up fast when bullets are flying over your head.

[Salomaybe] is my presentation, my vision of the world. Not so much to satisfy the audience at large.

“To be or not to be is” [by William Shakespeare] beyond anything I can comprehend.

Acting is hard work. At times, it’s very energizing and enervating.

I’ ve won awards. And they didn’t make me feel bad winning them.

I’ve been a lavatory attendant, a theatre usher, a panhandler, all for real. Now, as an actor, I can be a journalist today and a brain surgeon tomorrow. That’s the stuff my dreams are made of.

I’m constantly striving to break through to something new.

Playing a character is an illusion, and I feel that when you know too much about a person, possibly part of that illusion is disrupted.

I’m naturally shy but I’ve done this [movie Salomaybe] so much and you get better at it than you would think.

There has been a lot of self-doubt and unwelcome events in my life.

The play will invariably be different and stronger, and much more fulfilling and richer on all counts. There’s no doubt in my mind about it.

Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions.

I don’t like what’s going on in Iraq, naturally. I’m part of a large majority of people who don’t, but I do not know the whole story.

My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman.

I can see [ talent or curiosity for acting] in my oldest daughter [Julia Marie Pacino]. I don’t know how long she’ll run away from it, but it’s there in her.

Opinions I have about anything are in my personal life.

We don’t have storm troopers that just knock on the door of every American citizen. We don’t do that for any crime. But when we have evidence that a particular person has committed a crime, we send law enforcement to apprehend them.

The truth is every problem can’t be solved by government. Many are caused by the moral breakdown in our society. And the answers to those challenges lie primarily in our families and our faiths, not our politicians.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

My mom’s an artist in every way. She’s a painter, a photographer. She’s a wanderer – always searching, always seeing. I guess you could say my mom gave me her eyes.

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.

Every nation on the Earth that embraces market economics and the free enterprise system is pulling millions of its people out of poverty. The free enterprise system creates prosperity, not denies it.

Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything.