There's not much to say about acting but this. Never settle back on your heels. Never relax. If you relax, the audience relaxes. And always mean everything you say.

Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum, I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance. I always leapt at the opportunity to dance in films later on.

My father was totally Irish, and so I went to Ireland once. I found it to be very much like New York, for it was a beautiful country, and both the women and men were good-looking.

Once a song and dance man, always a song and dance man. Those few words tell as much about me professionally as there is to tell.

You dirty, double-crossing rat.

You don't psych yourself up for these things, you do them... I'm acting for the audience, not for myself, and I do it as directly as I can.

Outside of my family, the prime concern of my life has been nature and its order, and how we have been savagely altering that order.