Since I've started to star in pictures I have always managed to retain my singularity of purpose when I got into the business, which was to be an artist, as an actor, more than anything else. But to get the certain kind of role you want, you have to be in a certain position in the business and it's dog-eat-dog and it gets very hairy and you can lose your point of view sometimes.

I'm curious about what makes people do things that they do, unless it's absolutely terrifying to me.

I never voted for a president until I felt Obama had a dream and might pull it off, and that was the first time I ever voted for a president.

The people I worked with were bigger than life. Once you put them on the screen, they were huge.

In all American professional sports you start on a certain level and you have to work your way up through a farm system. It's really the same in acting.

I'm not good at living in the grim places...when we did Gatsby, I lived in Claridges, that's where I wanted to live. I can't live in grimness and then go play a classy human being.

When I was starting to get noticed as an actor in the 1970s for something other than the third cowboy on the right who ended up dying in every movie or episode, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world.