“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.”

[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.

Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

They wont all lie to you but a lot of them will. And itll be the easiest lie they ever had to tell to get your votes.

I really don’t like plays or movies that service propaganda.

Life is great-I wouldn’t know what I’d do without it.

I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup.

Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.

life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; … it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it’s as though you aren’t there.

There are times I can’t even figure myself out.

Arthur V. Berger commenting on the music of Aaron Copland: Here is at last an American that we may place unapologetically beside the great recognized creative figures of any other country.

I don’t know. Your the Jedi Master, you figure it out.

If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.

Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.

I know my flavor’s going to work because I just know there’s not a lot of guys like me around. So you got to figure out what’s that about you.

Once I realized music was working, I was getting money off of shows and I figured that I could find success through music.

Think you figured it out, but you don’t have a clue. Think you on top of the world, but the world on top of you.