It makes it fun. When an actor plays a character, you want what that character wants. Otherwise it doesn't look authentic. So I really want to defeat Jimmy - I mean Jimmy as the character.

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.

You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.

I'm an angry person, angrier than most people would imagine, I get flashes of anger. What works for me is working out when it's useful to use that anger.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.

It's really clear to me that you can't hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas.

No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.

When people are laughing, they're generally not killing one another.

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.

Almost everybody that's well-known gets tagged with a nickname.

It's too bad I'm not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.

I wouldn't live in California. All that sun makes you sterile.

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.

Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you.

I've never tried to manipulate my image.

I found I wasn't asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something. I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn't know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen.

Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.

You wouldn't want to be called a sell-out by selling a product. Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.

If I can't get the girl, at least give me more money.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.

It makes it fun. When an actor plays a character, you want what that character wants. Otherwise it doesn't look authentic. So I really want to defeat Jimmy - I mean Jimmy as the character.

Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

I'm in the real world, some people try to steal from me, and I stop them, frequently, take them to court. I love a good lawsuit. It's fun.

Be fair with others, but then keep after them until they're fair with you.

I've been nominated twice before as actor in a leading part. Now I'm nominated as actor in a supporting part. If I don't win, I'll just wait until I'm nominated for being in the theater during the show. Do they have one like that?

It's not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It's a picture of somebody trying to figure things out. I'm not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn't interest me.

When does she do all this thinking? We're together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We've been married 48 years.

I'm most at home on the stage. I was carried onstage for the first time when I was six months old.

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life.

'Never Have Your Dog Stuffed' is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.

Achingly funny as it was, Larry Gelbart's writing gave off sparks that turned a hard light on the way we are.

All I've ever tried to do is play real people.

And I think belief is one of those things that comes to people in their own way. And just because I believe in something doesn't mean I think that you should.

Any play is hard to write, and plays are getting harder and harder to get on the stage.

Anyone I know who's almost died has come out of it, at least for a while, looking at things differently.

As an artist, as an actor, as a writer, you have to use what's personal to you. You have to be personal about your work; otherwise, it doesn't ring true.

Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.

Awards shows mainly publicize the people giving the awards.

Backstage life is terrific training for an actor, seeing shows from the wings.

Begin challenging your assumptions. Your assumptions are the windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile or the light won't come in.

Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in while, or the light won't come in.

Blind dates are treacherous. You don't know who this person is. You wonder, 'Should I call my grandma during coffee to get out of this?'

For me, I find that even though I've accomplished a few things in my life, looking back on accomplishments doesn't give me a sense of satisfaction.

I always loved Sid Caesar and all the people on his program.

I don't really worry about the size of the part much any more. It's nice to have more time to work on the character, and to have big scenes to play. But if there's something playable there, and if it's interesting to do, then that's nice.

I don't watch that much TV, so I can't compare one show to another. When I watch television, I watch people talking to one another usually or a science show where they show me microbes, you know. Microbes actually communicate quite a bit, and so there's a lot of talking going on.

I feel like every time a door is opened by science, suddenly there are a hundred doors that need to get opened. That's what makes it an everlasting, interesting experience to go through.