I've worked for 27 years nonstop in theater and films. That's a lot of work.

The whole industry is so screwed up by economics. It's disgusting to me.

My dream as a youngster was to be like Olivier. To be a great stage actor. To be a great Shakespearean actor. To me that is the Olympics of acting.

You love what you do, you are cursed with it, and then you get known for being cursed with it.

I don't champion the idea of being in a Hollywood movie. I never had fun in one of them.

I go out there and make a fool of myself. It's inevitable.

I stopped courting Hollywood a long time ago.

Acting is a total physical, emotional sensation.

I live a very quiet life, although I'm very urban and a diehard New Yorker.

The Italian gangster thing has become a form of the modern-day Western.

I've worked for 27 years nonstop in theater and films. That's a lot of work.

Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.

It's a blessing and a curse. But it's not always the best situation to be in. As a profession, I don't recommend acting at all.

I never pursued a career relentlessly.

I never pursued Hollywood banging my drum, because I was never in a film big enough to do that.

Maybe you don't work for seven months a year, but you'll work again. It may be a piece of garbage, so you wear hip boots.

I do not want to act unless I have a a great intimacy with the people I'm working with.

I've brought my daughters all over the world-they travel with me. I drag them out of school just to keep the relationship. When I'm home I'm a big-time daddy.

I've got the best deal on Earth. Where else can I sin and know that I'm forgiven for it?

The Italian gangster thing has become a form of the modern day Western.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.

In a theater, the part is mine and I can control it as I want to. In the movies, I don't have direct contact, and I am fighting technical machinery.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.

Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.

I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.

I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.

Sheer flattery got me into the theater. Flattery always works with me, particularly the flattery of women.

Actually, I didn't like Dartmouth very much, but the whole theater scene I really liked.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

It was very natural for me to want to disappear into dark theater, I am really very shy. That is something that people never seem to fully grasp because, when you are an actor, you are meant to be an exhibitionist.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.

You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.

Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn't done my job.

I'd also like to do a play. I've never done theater, and constantly changing and refining a performance is something I'd like to do, even though it may sound like work to some people - and it probably is work.

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

And I'm in favor of that because I have a gay son, who's a very successful theater designer.

Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.

I started acting when I was 10, doing musical theater. I was a brunette at that time. I was always cast in all the exotic parts.

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.

I really would rather have gone to New York, since all my training had been in theater, but I didn't have the guts to go there alone. I knew only one person in New York, and that was a man. What I needed was a woman. That's the way Southern girls thought.

I've always just gone with the best role, and I don't care if it's in theater, film or television.

Playing in front of an audience was just such a turn-on for me, and you have 200 people in the audience and it's like doing live theater. And filming something that goes to millions of people several weeks later, it's an interesting dynamic.

I was obsessed with romance. When I was in high school, I saw 'Doctor Zhivago' every day from the day it opened until the day it left the theater.

I'm supposed to be a pretty good theater actor.

Journalism as theater is what TV news is.

I'll see you at the theater tonight. I'll hold your seat til you get there. After that you're on your own.