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

I’m expressing something that I feel is a way to exercise my talent and help communicate a role as a human being in a movie, I will do that.

I wouldn’t be interested in [nowadays] television simply because I think it goes too fast.

Romantic love can be a lot of crap, though, let me tell you. And it can hurt you.

I want to be a great actor someday, and I’ve decided there’s no use philosophizing; the only way is to work at my craft.

I learned to wrestle, I learned defensive fighting at a young age, because when someone hit me, I would throw up and fall down.

You’ve got to think of things as an opportunity. An audition’s an opportunity to have an audience.

Freedom, baby, is never having to say youre sorry.

To me, it’s not who you love… a man, a woman, what have you… it’s the fact that you love. That is all that truly matters.

Being the actors of the craft, the trade, one of the big things you do and you learn is about repeating.

You want to finally come to a point where you say that the women you’re with is also your friend.

We were doing Scarface many years ago…and I remember having my coffee and looking at the beach, the surf, and I saw a hundred people looking out into the ocean.

I found out how temperamental I am, yes. And that sometimes that can be kind of off-putting.

My grandfather was a provider. Work, any kind of work, was the joy of his life.

I’m so shy now I wear sunglasses everywhere I go.

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 don’t think actors should ever expect to get a role, because the disappointment is too great.

I did not feel a particularly strong call to any one subject, but read voraciously and widely and began to find science interesting.

I do the interviews and then I read about myself. I understand it and I get what it is. But there’s so much stuff that I say, either jokingly or lightheartedly, that gets printed like I’m dead serious.

I had a nice read on the putt and I said to myself, ‘This is for you, Jesus, ‘ and knocked it in.

I’m not a fan of ‘write what you know.’ If you don’t know, find out. I knew nothing about the Bible before I started writing ‘The Year of Living Biblically.’ That was kind of the point – to learn.

From the time I read my first Hemingway work, The Sun Also Rises, as a student at Soldan High School in St. Louis, I was struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe.

My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it’ll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It’s like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read.

However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.