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

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.

Keep pace with the present. Take a trip to the moon. envision the future.

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.

Working with Brando was fun. It was like a tennis match. We played unbelievably well together.

Maybe the one I enjoyed playing most was A Month in the Country.

It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

You can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.