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 totally sports-oriented; I relate a lot of my career and everything to sports.

There's no time in life to do all the roles I'd like to play.

I tried to make the Olympics team in 1956

The big reason why I became an actor in the first place was to communicate. I never acted in high school...I was desperate to communicate.

Everybody can't be like Redford and pop out there and make big bucks right away because you look like a Greek god... The guy's a friend of mine and he has absolutely no privacy in his life.

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.