“You can certainly extend your adolescence. There’s people that are very good at extending it indefinitely.”

From my point of view, things don’t have to change to get better. Things are fantastic.

Acting is broad enough a church that you can pick your races, decide which way you want to go at different times.I think that the story and circumstance tends to dictate the most and then what you do with your own approach after that.

One of the things that I found very confronting in my early working life was that people thought I was some sensitive doe-eyed lovelorn boy, because they’d seen me do that a couple of times. What tends to happen is you get a run of similar roles.

People don’t know who I am, and that’s not a bad thing at all from my end.

At 15 I had moved out of my parents’ place, and my options were looking pretty narrow. But I had this acting thing and I just wanted to be able to keep going because it was really good. That was all I wanted.

There were the usual types of things that happen, in a production, like logistical bullshit, and this and that and the other. That’s the sort of stuff that happened. But I never felt, in a creative sense, that we were ever veering into a place that I hadn’t signed on for.

I mean, there’s a sense wherein you skip a part of childhood, too, when you start working at that age I did; I was out working and out of home at 15, paying my own way in the world.

I’m very interested in the history of Christianity, and what I can say for sure is that the Catholics and the Jesuits and stuff were very big on teaching and on learning.

As an outsider in America, you do see the kind of hypocrisy that’s rampant there.

I’ve spent various periods of my career being thought of as various things, various degrees of substance and ideas.

The people I’ve encountered who are really dangerous in my life don’t go around with their fangs drawn – they are dangerous because of the way they interpret what’s going on.

I think now there’s much more of a confessional culture. That’s not my bag. I come from a slightly older school of thought: ‘give ’em nothin.’ You don’t plead guilty.

There’s very little different between the way the government operates in America and the way criminals do.

If you ride like lightning, you’re gonna crash like thunder.

Acting is a bit of a heart and soul exercise with me. It’s kind of all I’ve got.

There are two things: 1) what things one does in the world, and 2) what family one has. There’s the two really tangible things that can stay.

I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when “Howl” and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up.

Having your adolescence at an all-male boarding school is just crap.

Many, many individuals will report starting to form their lifelong interests around adolescence. Why that is, researchers don’t fully know. But if you can take a trip down memory lane and see what interested you, that’s at least a clue as to where your interest may begin to develop.

From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.

Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.

The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence.

I’m obsessed with adolescence. I love to write about people in their 20s.

Most people don’t get out of childhood, or adolescence, without being wounded for telling the truth. Someone says ‘you can’t say that’ or ‘you shouldn’t say that’ or ‘that wasn’t appropriate’.