“Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one’s own experience and sensations, to make one’s self heard and seen.”

I think, by and large, the level of acting is mediocre. When I go to the theatre, I get so angry. I don’t go.

I love going to the movies; I love watching good movie actors. They must know something I don’t.

I love playing Chekhov. That’s the hardest; that’s why I love it most.

The knowledge that every day there is something more to learn, something higher to reach for, something new to make for others, makes each day infinitely precious

I won’t go to England because they won’t let my dog in.

Usually, someone who’s in a show gets me a ticket. I feel cornered. I can’t walk out if I don’t like it.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks a democracy has depended on its philosophers and creative artists. It can only flourish by continuous probing, prodding, and questioning of the social conditions under which man exists and tries to better himself.

We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare.

Thoughts and feelings are suspended in a vacuum unless they instigate and feed the selected actions, and it is the characters actions which reveal the character in the play.

The need to be loved and protected is at a peak when we feel abandoned and are particularly vulnerable to difficult circumstances.

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn’t be an actor. You’re in the wrong profession.

I’m a bad liar; I don’t know what to say backstage.

To rebel or revolt against the status quo is in the very nature of an artist.

This concept must be changed; we must realize in our bones that almost everything in time and history has changed except the human being.

All tedious research is worth one inspired moment.