The government gave me enough money to go to acting school.

I was born in and worked in a period that could be called enviable.

If you know how to live in Vegas you can have the best time.

It's such a human condition, whether you're a great track star or a great knitting person or you paint watercolors - someone knows who you are.

I will always remember this summer day in Paris, when I was to perform a great acrobatic move. I can still see myself stepping on the ring of a packed circus along real performers.

I look at everything in an artistic way.

Every movie I've been in has ended up on television.

The government gave me enough money to go to acting school.

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.

My whole world before I joined the Navy was my neighborhood in the Bronx.

It is for the latter that I always wanted to be an actor: to play characters who are always on the move.

For instance, I always have one hanging in Budapest in the mayors office.

I want the public to know that it will be an honor for me to meet them and spend a few special moments with all those who helped me through my filmed career.

Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.

While you're doing it, you don't really know what you're doing.

I'm world famous, everywhere I go there are people who love me because of I've been able to bring them some joy from the movies I've made.

Its not age as much as the experiences I have had.

I wouldn't be caught dead marrying a woman old enough to be my wife.

The movie business is very twisted, out of site, out of mind, you know.

They gave me away as a prize once - a Win Tony Curtis For A Weekend competition. The woman who won was disappointed. She'd hoped for second prize - a new stove.

Now I'm a painter. That was another opportunity I was able to pursue, I've been painting all my life, now it's become a second career because of my success in the movies.

I like Vegas for its spontaneity.

I've made 122 movies, and I daresay there's a picture of mine showing somewhere in the world every day.

The service meant so much to me. You don't know privileged I feel and how lucky I am to have served.

I enlisted when I was a boy. The Navy looked after me like my mother. It fed me, took care of me and gave me wonderful opportunities.

Painting is much more than therapy to me its a way of life.

I used to be good friends with my depression, saying oh I'm so depressed, or life is terrible.

I can't sit around and wait for the telephone to ring.

I've been in the movies for 50 years, I've made 130 some-odd movies.

At 17, I dreamed of seeing the world. At 19, I had been around the world and back.

Even on a personal note, my dressing table downstairs is crowded with things, like a mini landscape. It's a city with buildings and towers and roads. There's a pool and a little park. When I move something around it becomes a different tableau.

I've just opened a show in Florida, although I also have many pieces on display around the world.

Everywhere I go in the world, people know me and recognise me and really show affection for me.

I joined the Navy hoping to be submariner and ended up in the sub service aboard a tender in the Pacific.

Yes I'm still working, but my life's no longer filled with it.

I enjoy being recognized whatever environment I'm in.

We often don't think of them, we think of the great wars and the great battles, but what about losing a son or a daughter, or a girl losing her husband or vice versa? I think of the people who never got the chance to have the opportunities I had.

But my longevity is due to my good timing.

I don't know what organically grown chickens are; I've never seen one.

It was always part of the plan to move into acting.

Be where the acting is. I live in Houston. Dallas is 4 1/2 hours away. I let them know there's no difference.

My mother keeps things in perspective for me. She makes me realize that the acting I do and love is no more important than what one of my brothers does-he works in a shoe repair shop. If my career ever tapers off, I'll go to college.

In Hungary, acting is a career for which one fits himself as earnestly as one studies for a degree in medicine, law, or philosophy.

I think acting is about forgetting yourself in order to give the best of yourself. It's passing through you more than you're creating it. You're not the flower, but the vase which holds the flower.

In LA, too many people want to go the quickest route from A to B. Method acting offers them that.

I don't see it as a form of healing, because if you have wounds that are bleeding I don't think acting will ever get them to stop. But I find acting is a form of illumination.

Maybe I can't act, but I know the gimmicks. I studied acting all my life and know what's good for me.

I know that if I'd had to go and take an exam for acting, I wouldn't have got anywhere. You don't take exams for acting, you take your courage.

I'm not acting, but I am acting.