Chekhov was as important to me as anybody as a writer.

I'm not a violent person, never was, but I have this temperament that I've always displayed. I guess it has to do with my tradition and being Italian, we're very outgoing with our emotions.

Great directors can understand the staging in such a way that can make a scene come alive. Others have a certain way of pacing the scene.

Without coffee something’s missing

Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.

It was a compromise. There was a sense that I could write my own memoirs, and Larry [Grobel] would help me down the line, or maybe not, maybe he was too close to me.

Many years ago, in the late '70s, I toured colleges along the East Coast and I presented a kind of show where I got a lot of books and poetry and pieces of [William] Shakespeare and other writers that I admire, read it to the class and then afterward we would talk and I would answer questions. It was really a way of expressing and finding out about where I was at that particular time, so it was very therapeutic for me.