A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.

I have never indulged our society's misguided notion that my personal life is relevant to my work, so any reporting surrounding that is necessarily hearsay, speculation or fantasy.

You have to let go of stuff when you act for a while. You stay too attached to things that have worked or haven't worked, it kind of makes it harder for you to move forward. So I try to concentrate on the experience that I have and then let the public expression of it be its own deal.

All you really have when you're acting is the confidence and your ability to manage and tell a story by creating a character.

If I had done 'Titanic,' it would have made, probably, $200,000 - worldwide. So I think my life would have been very, very similar.

When somebody on a professional scale says "you did it wrong," it has a pretty intense impact. If you don't have some kind of opposing force to say, "that's all right, that's their opinion," or, "I may have screwed that one up but I'll do better the next time," then you're screwed.

I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.