“How can I ever hope to communicate something to you unless I get signals back from you that I’m on the right track or that I’ve started at some place that you’re familiar with?”

Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.

Jean Paul Sartre says in “No Exit” that hell is other people. Well, our task in life is to make it heaven. Or at least earth.

Kids are natural scientists.

As I am becoming older, the only thing that speeds up is time.

I guess in a world uncomfortable with uncertainty, an unbeliever must be an atheist, and possibly an infidel.

It’s really clear to me that you can’t hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas.

[You have to be] willing to be changed by the person you’re listening to, where you’re not just waiting for a pause so you can say your thing, but you’re actually letting them have an effect on you if they can.

I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be.

I play tennis non-obsessively. I seem to beat people I play a lot or half the time, so I guess I gravitate to people who are as bad as I am.

I’m in this wonderful position where I can do what interests me. And whatever comes along that interests me, I do. The rest of the time I bother scientists about communicating.

Whenever you wonder about yourself, look up at the stars swirling around in the heavens and just realize how tiny and puny they are.

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.

It’s too bad I’m not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.

It’s nice to have more time to work on the character, and to have big scenes to play. But if there’s something playable there, and if it’s interesting to do, then that’s nice.

I’m most at home on the stage. I was carried onstage for the first time when I was six months old.

It’s not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It’s a picture of somebody trying to figure things out.

And you can constantly look back when you’re in some sort of fix and say, “Well, on so-and-so film, we did this, and it worked out fine.”

I remember once having to stop performing when I thought an elderly man a few rows back from the front was actually going to die because he was laughing so hard.

Any time you lose a few in a row, you have to hit reset and come back tomorrow and do the best you can to forget about how the past series went. It’s frustrating.

There’ll be a special place in hell for the tape back-up people.

Well, first he called me up to tell me to clear my crap back out of his shop – and he said, “

The music industry’s very laid back while I’m very, very aggressive.

Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony.

I’m always thinking, ‘my career is over, I have to move back to Omaha, and work on the railroad, with the rest of my family. So no, I’m never thinking I’ve ‘arrived.’ I think that’s a good way to be.