It's hard for people to get their hands around fame, because it's heady stuff, and you have to look at it as being dangerous explosives, and you have to handle it with care.

I was a hangover of that era where they’d say “Take off that medal! Is that a St. Christopher medal? You’re going to lose your audience with that.”

It's my personal opinion and I'm not espousing it to anybody else, I think your immune system and how healthy you are determines how you react to any excess of any kind.

This is a business that I have always had the last laugh in.It has nothing to do with acting, it has to do with good karma.

A lot of actors flame out.

The first thing my agent told me in 1959 was he said you have to have something recognizable that people will remember. “What are you? Do you have cleft in your chin? You have a Jimmy Stewart kind of talk?” And I thought I don’t know what I can give them that will be different.

I remember a meeting I had at MGM. It was at the end of their reign. They say we have you under contract, and because you’re under contract, we’d like to you to work. I said, well, that seems fair. But if it’s a really good movie, they were going to give it to a particular actor that was not under contract. The bottom line was they were going to pay you more if it was a bad one and pay you less if it was a good one.