If you're going to define me properly, you must think in terms of my failures as well as my successes.

Acting was a way out at first. A way out of not knowing what to do, a way of focusing ambitions. And the ambition wasn't for fame. The ambition was to do an interesting job.

[On being an actor] .nothing more than a worker in a service occupation . It's like being a waiter or a gas station attendant, but I'm waiting on 6 million people in a week if I'm lucky.

The only thing that I have done that is not mitigated by luck, diminished by good fortune, is that I persisted, and other people gave up.

Some actors couldn't figure out how to withstand the constant rejection. They couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It took me a long time to figure out how to act, and how to conduct myself in the business so I could get what I felt I needed to support my potential and give them what they wanted.

I just don't think of age and time in respect of years. I have too much experience of people in their seventies who are vigorous and useful and people who are thirty-five who are in lousy physical shape and can't think straight. I don't think age has that much to do with it.