Having spent so much time in a fictional world, I prefer to read about the real world

When I go to the old folks' home, I'm gonna be sitting in a rocking chair, telling everybody how I worked with Jack [Lemmon] and Walter [Matthau].

I actually had some funny dialogue [ in Stardust Memories], a little piece, and we shot all day in this big ballroom. Gordon Willis was the director of photography, and at the end of the day, Gordon turned to Woody Allen and said, "We cannot accomplish all of this in this space. It's impossible." And we'd been rehearsing and trying to shoot this thing all day. So Woody said, "Okay, let's do something else." He looked at me and said, "Come back tomorrow, I'll put you in something else." And he did.

Initially I objected to the Data makeup. I said, "Why do I need this makeup? Why can't I just look like me?" In fact, I said to Gene Roddenberry, "Don't you think that by this time in history, they would've figured out how to make skin look like skin?" And he said, "What makes you think that what you have isn't better than skin?" And I went, "Um, okay."

It's fun to do something different. And there are things you can do in a small palate that you can't necessarily do in a larger role. You can go a little further and do things you could never pull off for any length of time, but you can do for the short run.

Both of the Quaid brothers, Randy and Dennis, were in my class, and Tommy Schlamme, who produced and directed The West Wing with Aaron Sorkin, among many others. Marianne Williamson, who did A Course In Miracles, she was in my high-school drama class, too. So it was kind of an amazing class.

[Martin Scorsese ] basically works just like any other director. You work the scene, you try to find what's best in it and make it work. That's what it was like.