I don’t mind watching plays once in a while, but as long as I don’t have to be in them.

The last time I heard real screaming in the theatre was when I went to see a movie I did years ago, called ‘Wait Until Dark.’ Now, my mother was the least emotional person on...

No matter what you do or where you are, you’re going to be missing out on something.

I don’t believe in competitions between artists. This is insane. Who has the authority to say someone is better?

It’s murder to doubt yourself in life. It took until I was 45 to get to that point. As hard as it is in your work, it’s harder in your life. But it can be...

Something I miss terribly from the ’60s – the most important phrase in the English language was, ‘I got hung up.’ Somebody says they got hung up, it’s unassailable, you know? You don’t go near...

The years I spent paying my dues are in the background, and so are my concerns about whether my performance is good or bad.

I gotta keep busy. I’m not happy unless I’m working on two, three things.

A product is most easily sold when it has an identity. So they wrap you all up and put a label on you. And then that’s what you have to be. But what I’m looking...

That’s the privilege of old age: You don’t have to remember.

I get a little upset, yeah, if a year goes by and I don’t get a script. Thank God I have other interests that keep me from becoming a nervous wreck.

My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie,...

I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix. The ancient Vedas – the oldest Hindu philosophy – and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that’s true, there’s...

I want to feel like I’m doing something creative and trying different things, putting different hats on and playing. I don’t know what’s the point otherwise; otherwise, it’s just a job. You punch a time...

I love doing kids’ shows, and I love working with kids. I’ve done a lot of it. A lot of people don’t like working with children, but I love it.

‘Catch-22’ was a huge failure, and it rubbed off on everybody connected to it. I had a bunch of lean years where I had to do things, a lot of which I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic...

Everybody’s career has ups and downs. I like to take chances; I don’t like to stand still. And I don’t give a damn what the market is interested in; I want to try things.

I know that if I can’t move people, then I have no business being an actor.

My favorite thing is to be working with people I enjoy working with. I’ve reached the point where, emotionally, I don’t need to act any more. Financially, I do. But emotionally, it wouldn’t matter to...

I had to jump around in the arts for a while just to survive. I earned a little money here and there, playing the guitar at union meetings, functions. I sold some science-fiction stories. I...

I’m not sure if I’ve learned anything from show business. Life in general has taught me if you’re kind to people, everything gets easier. Being a decent person really smoothes the way for you and...

I never had a better role than I had in ‘Little Miss Sunshine.’ That was one of my favorite roles ever.

Education does not mean jamming information into somebody’s head. Rather, it’s that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.

I love working if it’s with people who are capable of having a good time. People with a little bit of enjoyment of what they do. If it’s enormous pressure, and people feel that their...

I wanted to make it in New York. I thought if I went out to the Midwest, I’d be burying myself. But I was wrong.

Over the years, I played with a couple of spectacular guitar players, and playing with them has made me play better than I knew how to play. I hope the same thing is true with...

If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you’re doing something else or not. You can be connected with community theater or make your own little movies....

There have been times when I’ve been broke, and a job came along, and I’ve said, ‘Yeah! Let’s do it!’ But I will never do something without having a feeling of knowing how to play...

I’m as old as I am, and I don’t try to hide it. It’s not a big deal.

Filmmakers, they tell me they want to make movies. I say, ‘Good, go out, buy a $500 camera, get some friends and make a movie. Don’t go to Hollywood. Stay wherever you are.’

No matter how much time you spend reading books or following your intuition, you’re gonna screw it up. Fifty times. You can’t do parenting right.

I was a stoopball fan. I played stoopball all the time.

People think that the people in Hollywood have some master plan. They just make the movies that people go to see. I think it’s that simple. I promise you if people were lining up around...

It’s – everybody’s looking at the bottom line all the time, and failure doesn’t look good on the bottom line, and yet you don’t learn anything without failing.

Things have got to add up to 100 points. The script is part of it, the character is part of it, the people I’m working with is the third part of it – and any...

I’m used to changing a lot of the dialogue. But if I feel like the script is working, I don’t want to mess with it.

I don’t care about names attached to the script. That doesn’t matter to me. All things being equal, I would like to work with a good script with a good director, and the part I...

For everybody, the tide comes in, the tide goes out – if you’re an actor, particularly.

I was terrified of being on stage, and I had to work very hard at a craft to get past that.

Success has nothing to do with box office as far as I’m concerned. Success has to do with achieving your goals, your internal goals, and growing as a person. It would have been nice to...

NI love watching science fiction because I feel like when it’s done well, it’s not just monsters, but philosophy. Really good science fiction like, ‘2001,’ for example, or the first ‘Matrix.’ But it takes someone...

TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn’t use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not. People think they have to have an answer...

I’m very old. I haven’t got time to be charming.

I don’t like improvising on camera, particularly, but very often, a scene will not be working, and you rehearse it once or twice, and you realize something’s missing. So I’ll play with it until it...

I don’t know why we have to put things in boxes of superlatives. That isolates them. Life is fluid, and the minute you start trying to put a line around something, it will deceive you...

I would rather die than do a play – 10 years in solitary instead.

What I look for these days is that I don’t have long speeches, the characters gets to sit down a lot, I don’t have to learn any foreign languages, and it doesn’t shoot in Minneapolis...

I used to have a lot of philosophies of acting; they all fell apart over the years.

You hit a certain age, and you haven’t died yet, and you become an elder statesman. I think I get a lot of applause because I’m not keeling over.

I gotta make a living. I make no bones about that. Most actors do. But within that context, I’ve never not tried to make something as fresh and alive as I possibly could make it.