“If you can identify with people, you can empathize with people and therefore you understand things.”

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.

A lot of acting is private time.

It used to worry me what people said about me. I’m learning not to worry as much.

Everything changes with age. The parts change with age, your feelings about them change, roles that I would’ve wanted to play 10 years ago, I don’t want to play now.

The camera can film my face but until it captures my soul, you don’t have a movie.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.