There's nothing more ironic or contradictory than life itself.

One of the things about acting is it allows you to live other people's lives without having to pay the price.

I don't like to watch my own movies - I fall asleep in my own movies.

I think Hollywood has a class system. The actors are like the inmates, but the truth is they're running the asylum.

I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, 'There's no place like New York. It's the most exciting city in the world now. That's the way it is. That's it.'

When you make a drama, you spend all day beating a guy to death with a hammer, or what have you. Or, you have to take a bite out of somebody's face. On the other hand, with a comedy, you yell at Billy Crystal for an hour, and you go home.

It's important not to indicate. People don't try to show their feelings, they try to hide them.

The talent is in the choices.

There's nothing more ironic or contradictory than life itself.

You'll have time to rest when you're dead.

There is a certain combination of anarchy and discipline in the way I work.

I've never been one of those actors who has touted myself as a fascinating human being. I had to decide early on whether I was to be an actor or a personality.

You learned the two greatest thing in life, never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.

Good directors can bring certain things out of you, with their intensity or gentleness or sensitivity or understanding. They can make an actor feel he can do no wrong.

I always tell actors when they go in for an audition: Don't be afraid to do what your instincts tell you. You may not get the part, but people will take notice.

I love to find new people. It's not for the sake of their being new; it's because if you find someone who perfectly fits a part, that's such a great thing.

I mean, the actors that I admired were Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, an actress named Barbara Harris. And Greta Garbo. They were great actors.

I spent lunchtime in a grave during the filming of 'Bloody Mama.' When you're younger, you feel that's what you need to do to help you stay in character. When you get older, you become more confident and less intense about it - and you can achieve the same effect.

I think it's important to have had at least a few years of obscurity, where people treat you like everybody else.

I'll work with a director if I think I'm going to get into a comfortable situation, and if it's someone I respect and who respects me, even if they're not so well known. Movies are hard to make, and you have to work toward a common ethic and do your best.

If it's a very emotional scene, you're kind of relieved when you've done it, kind of spent. And there are times when you can be rattled, certain characters if they're hyper, that can carry over, the residue of that. But I try to leave it on the set.

If it's the right chair, it doesn't take too long to get comfortable in it.

Italy has changed. But Rome is Rome.

Movies are hard work. The public doesn't see that. The critics don't see it. But they're a lot of work. A lot of work.

My mother worked for a woman, Maria Ley-Piscator, who with her husband founded the Dramatic Workshop, which was connected to the New School. My mother did proofreading and typing and stuff or her, and as part of her payment, I was able to take acting classes there on Saturdays when I was 10.

The director respects what they've hired you for and chosen you for: to do the part and respect what you're doing.

The hardest thing about being famous is that people are always nice to you.

Time goes on. So whatever you're going to do, do it. Do it now. Don't wait.

Auditions are like a gamble. Most likely you won't get the part, but if you don't go, you'll never know if you could've got it.

When you feel that you cant fight it you just go for it. When it comes to the arts passion should always trump common sense.

You learned the two greatest things in life, never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.