“It’s much harder to act in a bad film than in a good one. A terrible script makes for very difficult acting. You can win an Academy Award for some of the easiest acting in your career, made possible by a brilliant script.”

Maybe it’s time we all stop trying to outsmart the truth and let it have its day.

I feel like 35. At 35 you’re old enough to know something and young enough to look forward to what you can do with the knowledge. So I stayed at 35!

The old guys like me started in the theatre. I was in the theatre for nine years.

When I look in the mirror, I see someone who’s happy with how he looks, because I was never one of the handsome Hollywood people. And I’ve had success as I’ve gotten older, because I’m able to play characters. I no longer get the girl, but I get the part.

Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he’s that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it’s not, I assure you.

In my opinion, everybody is getting older and older. We have a great deal of dementia because nobody grew old enough to get it.

I’ve never taken drugs – if you take a drug of your choice, you get some ecstatic feeling.

I never listened to the people who said I should give it up, which is the main advice I got.

Obsession is a young man’s game, and my only excuse is that I never grew old.

Acting is not a competition; everything must be done for the good of the film or else everybody loses.

I don’t see myself as anything. I just wander around getting on with my life.

First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don’t come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.

Be patient.Of course it will come. It took me years to get an Oscar.

Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.

There was a certain moment. I was about 61 – two, three or four, and I got a script. And I sent it back to the producer saying – “I don’t wanna do it. The part’s too small.” And he sent it back to me, he said, “You shouldn’t read the lover. You should read the father.

I prefer to remake flops. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a remake of a flop, and The Quiet American is a remake of a flop.

My first movie, I got nominated for a Canadian Oscar-for Meatballs. For MEATBALLS. And who am I up against? George C. Scott. So he wins the award and I stand up and go, ‘That’s it-let’s get the hell outta here.’

It was pop culture, entertainment, Hollywood, award shows – these are the things that really captivated me as a kid.

I was at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards one year – they called me up when somebody canceled two days before the thing, and asked me to present some awards.

Do awards change careers? Well, I haven’t heard of many stories where that’s the case. It’s a fun excuse to meet colleagues and celebrate people who’ve done well that year in certain people’s eyes, and it’s nothing more than that.

One thing is that I wasn’t getting booked that well, and they had control over who got the awards, they had control over who sold.

Awards don’t really mean much.

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.

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.