I like - it's not that I want to be someone different from me, but I suppose it partly is that. I love creating a character in a fantastical situation, like Dr. Frankenstein, like Leo Bloom, a little caterpillar who blossoms into a butterfly. I love that.

Gene Wilder often said that his job as an actor wasn't to make something funny but to make it real.

I was miscast in that production [of Mother Courage and Her Children] ... but it was with Anne Bancroft, whose boyfriend at the time was Mel Brooks, and that made my - I can't say my day, it made my life, in a way.

My basic mistake in 'The World's Greatest Lover' was that I made the leading character a neurotic kook and sent him to Hollywood. I should have made him a perfectly normal, sane, ordinary person, and sent him to Hollywood. The audience identifies with the lead character.

Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!

I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism.

I had improvised a lot in classes and at the Actors Studio, but I never did it in front of the camera.