“I think that the Oscar gives you some kind of guts or something, it gives you the illusion that you can do it. It’s good for business.”

You might get some serial killers who are born with a chip missing, but for the most part I don’t think anyone is born bad.

It depends, because sometimes an action role can be very demanding, and sometimes a dialogue-driven character can be very demanding, and vice versa. It depends.

Some roles have been with me forever

Hopefully, I can play both sides of the fence. That’s probably what winning the Oscar gives me, the chance to do something with a studio and do other things that I really want to do.

There’s a lot of Latinos right now, a lot of filmmakers and writers that are Latin too.

When some people get parts, they feel they can now relax, but for me it was always the opposite. Sometimes before I do a movie or before I act out a scene, I may not sleep well the night before. If I don’t know what the scene is about, I might get all worked up.

I’m a fan myself, so when a fan does something that might be strange, I understand it.

The very first things that I did, even in theater, were bad guys. They are meaty roles for the most part. With the bad guy you have more freedom to experiment and go further out than with a good guy.

You have to kill to survive. People have been doing it forever. I eat meat, and I eat fish. If I were on a deserted island I would need that to survive.

I get more choices of things, projects, which is a blessing and a curse. I can only do one at a time. Sometimes you don’t know which way to go.

I’ve liked most of the films that I’ve been in and those are the kinds of films I like to see.

I trained as a theatre actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by.

You deal with failure – strike, strike, strike – all the time. Acting is like that. You have to have a very thick skin in a way – your hair is too dark, you’re too ugly for the part, your audition wasn’t good.

I don’t think I could be a foot soldier. I don’t know if I could take orders too good. I’m a little lazy.

I’ve done a lot of movies, and you really never know. You do a movie and you think that it’s great, and then you see it and it doesn’t work.

I think having a vision can make someone an influential man. I’m not talking about acting or anything like that, I’m talking about people I admire, whether it’s a writer or a musician or a sports figure or a politician, whatever.

You know, the Oscar I was awarded for The Untouchables is a wonderful thing, but I can honestly say that I’d rather have won the U.S. Open Golf Tournament.

[Oscar Wilde’s Salome screenplay] is not autobiographical in a sense where you go to my house and see my kids and stuff like that, but that’s why I guess it’s semi-autobiographical.

I don’t see my Oscar much now. But when I first got it, there was a feeling for weeks afterward that I guess is akin to winning a gold medal in the Olympics.

It surprised me, the feeling I got when I won the Oscar for ‘Scent of a Woman.’ It was a new feeling. I’d never felt it.

Oscar Wilde said the rich and the poor are equal – they can both sleep under the bridge. Right?

Looking at the poems of John Gray when I saw the tiniest rivulet of text meandering through the very largest meadow of margin,

I suggested to Oscar Wilde that he should go a step further than these minor poets; he should publish a book all margin; full of beautiful, unwritten thoughts.

The guy who wins the Oscar for Best Actor has a much higher bar to clear than the woman who wins best actress.