There comes a point when you've exhausted your opportunities playing good guys. I've been around long enough, I think I'm entitled to explore a bit. But what I saw there was an opportunity to play a character different from what the audience's expectation was. A chance to take their crude experience of me - of my iconography, if you will - and turn it on its ear at an appropriate juncture in the film to be useful to the process of telling the story.

Wood burns faster when you have to cut and chop it yourself.

You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them.

[Jimmy] Breslin's [write] really great book on Branch Rickey. And Branch Rickey himself wrote quite a lot. There's some film and kinescope from television.

It's a wonderful opportunity to be part of a child's growing up, which is always an endless springtime. You see the blossoming and the growing and the nurturing and the payoff.

My work has always been important to me. The reason I continue to do it is because it's so much fun for me. I love my work and so that's what keeps me in the game.

If people recognize me when I'm out in public, I'm very nice to them. I'm very nice to people even when they don't recognize me. I don't even mind if people come up to me while I'm eating dinner, but if they recognize me while I'm having sex, I refuse to sign autographs.