“[Oscar Wilde’s Salome screenplay] is not autobiographical in a sense where you go to my house and see my kids and stuff like that, but that’s why I guess it’s semi-autobiographical.”

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.”

I had these little babies [my twins] and it gave me something so spectacular, such a feeling – I was so turned on and so excited by them that I wrote a poem.

When you’re acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back.

What’s this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?

All due respect and trying to be as modest as I can be,

I like women who can cook. That’s first. Love is very important, but you’ve got to have a friend first.

I don’t see my Oscar much now. But when I first got it, there was a feeling for weeks afterward that I guess is akin to winning a gold medal in the Olympics.

So that you and the audience are giving to each other, in a sense. It’s an extraordinary thing. It’s wild turf up there.

I went back to the stage because it was my way of dealing with the success I had, my way of coping.

The sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader’s part in the poet’s autobiographical life, in the poet’s memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.

What I was talking about was, of course, very autobiographical – ’68 was the moment when all the young people were incredibly excited, because when we were going to sleep, we knew we would wake up not tomorrow, but in the future.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

I had to find a way to be more honest about what happened. And it wasn’t fun to write, even though the poems aren’t 100% autobiographical.