All my friends were going off to be professionals, and I said I wanted to be an actor.

When I was a carpenter, I once worked with this Russian lady architect. I would tell her, ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I want to change that a half inch,’ and she would say, ‘No limit for better.’ I think that is a worthy credo. You keep on going until you get it as close to being right as the time and patience of others will allow.

The job's always the same. It involves helping to tell the story and creating an alloy between character and story that serves the film.

I didn't play much ball. I wasn't much of a ball fan.

Los Angeles is where you have to be if you want to be an actor. You have no choice. You go there or New York. I flipped a coin about it. It came up New York, so I flipped again. When you're starting out to be an actor, who wants to go where it's cold and miserable and be poor there?

Failures are inevitable. Unfortunately, in film they live for ever and they're 40 ft wide and 20 ft high.

Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved.