“Kids piercing themselves, piercing their tongues, what kind of masochism is that? Is it to show you can just take it?”

No, I don’t have to practice that grunt. You just do it. Once you’re in character, you’re in character. You don’t sit there purposely thinking, Well, I’ll grunt here, or I’ll groan there.

My wife is my closest friend. Sure, I’m attracted to her in every way possible, but that’s not the answer. Because I’ve been attracted to other people, and I couldn’t stand ’em after a while.

It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.

Go ahead, make my day.

Don Siegel last advice to me was ‘Don’t short yourself.’ He said the tendency is when an actor’s directing is to kind of you want to work on everybody else but you’re going to short yourself. He said, take the time to do a good job with yourself so that you’re satisfied with it.

My father had a couple of kids at the beginning of the Depression. There was not much employment. Not much welfare. People barely got by. People were tougher then.

As you get older you try to do things that please you more. You get a little more selfish. You start thinking I want to do things where I enjoy myself.

Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and that’s what everybody needs to know.

Participating in a gun buy-back program because you think that criminals have too many guns is like having yourself castrated because you think your neighbors have too many kids.

You have to teach yourself to act but Michael Chekhov will give you the necessary tools – and for me, Psychological Gesture and Centers are extremely valuable They work like a charm. I’ve used them all along and still do.

Extremism is so easy. You’ve got your position, and that’s it. It doesn’t take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left.

Hillary Clinton has made a lot of dough out of being a politician. I gave up dough to be a politician. I’m sure that Ronald Reagan gave up dough to be a politician.

I always liked characters that were more grounded in reality.

When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn’t out collecting for the Red Cross.

That’s one of the actor’s secrets: With everything you do, learn something new about yourself.

Hollywood seems to succumb to fads. Well, action films do well. Give me violence. Give me a scene where there’s a couple of car chases or shooting and stuff like that. They’re forgetting the fact that there’s a basic structure to a story that is essential to making it really broad and appealing.

I was the kid who never won the races. I never jumped the highest. I wasn’t on the list of the high-achieving.

It is still just unbelievable to us that diarrhea is one of the leading causes of child deaths in the world.

I think every family should have a dog; it is like having a perpetual baby; it is the plaything and crony of the whole house. It keeps them all young.

You know, I have seven children, so I guess I know some things about life.

Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio.

The older you get, the more you learn to see what you’ve been taught to see. When you’re a kid, you see what’s there.

As a child, as a teenager, I was kind of not allowed to wear fashionable clothes.

I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak. I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.