But the acting process - create a human being - was real, not only to the audience, but real to me.

To match the shoes with the jacket is fey. To match the shoes with the hat is taste.

My agent at the time, Mike Medavoy, before he became a movie mogul, called me up and said, how about a movie with you and Peter Boyle and Marty Feldman? And I said, well, what makes you think of that? He said because I now handle you and Peter Marty.

When your mother gives you confidence about anything that you do, you carry that confidence with you.She made me believe that I could make someone laugh.

I love the art of acting, and I love film, because you always have anther chance if you want it. You know, if we - if this isn't going well, you can't say - well, you could say - let's stop. Let's start over again, Gene, because you were too nervous.

We gave each other a hug, [Richard Pryor] said how much he admired me, I said how much I admired him, and we started working the next morning, and we hit it off really well, and he taught me how to improvise on camera.

Woody makes a movie as if he were lighting 10,000 safety matches to illuminate a city. Each one is a little epiphany: topical, ethnic, or political.