“I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.”

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.

When you are down and out something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends.

I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.

I dont believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody.

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.

I can think of nothing that an audience won’t understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.

I seem to have no dress sense at all. I’m always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as “looking like an unmade bed.” He was right!

I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

I’m one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour – and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.

Paris is the playwright’s delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor’s city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There’s a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don’t reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

Living in the lap of luxury isn’t bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.

I’m not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.

Crooks aren’t the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.