“The fruit falls off the tree. You don’t shake it off before it’s ready to fall.”

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.

If something is working, don’t fix it. Keep going. Go with the glow.

Or try out what I learned and see how it worked with an audience, because where are you gonna get an audience?

I love money because I’ve earned it. I won sixty G’s with my first knockout – and the week before, I was collecting social welfare.

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.

Perfect valour consists in doing without witnesses that which we would be capable of doing before everyone.

Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.

Perfect Valor is to do, without a witness, all that we could do before the whole world.

Any effects created before 1975 were done with either tape or echo chambers or some kind of acoustic treatment. No magic black boxes!

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.

THINK before you speak. Is it True, Helpful, Inspiring, Necessary, Kind?