“I’ve never cared for guns. In fact, when I did ‘Scent of a Woman’ I had to learn how to assemble one.”

When I was younger, I would go to auditions to have the opportunity to audition, which would mean another chance to get up there and try out my stuff.

Be careful how you judge people, most of all friends. You don’t sum up a man’s life in one moment.

Our life is looking forward or looking back, that’s it. Where is the moment?

And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.

Learning (Shakespeare’s plays) …in school was a bit of a bore.

The story of Salome, the play itself and what it is, what it contains, and my journey as an actor, as a director, as a filmmaker, as a person struggling with whatever I’m struggling with.

Here in these films [Salome the play and Salomaybe], I have the opportunity to say something about how I feel about things.

I would come home and she would tell me about her life that day and all her problems and I remember saying to her, look, you really got me through this picture because I would shed everything when I came home.

Sometimes they are the same exact thing.

I put comedy as much as I can into all my movies, if I can help it.

Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God… and where can you go from there?

It would be hard to play a character you don’t like – for me anyway – or can’t find something in them to like.

I don’t talk politics and I don’t talk philosophy or anything like that, but if you look at my work, you might get an expression of me as a person.

Certainly the movies were always in the air for me. I come from the era when actors thought it was a big deal to be in the movies.

I’m an actor, not a star. Stars are people who live in Hollywood and have heart-shaped swimming pools.

I once asked my oldest daughter [Julia Marie] if she thought about changing her name in school and she said, “No, I’m a Pacino. That’s my name.”