The funny thing is you oddly don't really say goodbye to all the characters you've played. There's like a chest of drawers in your head that you can always access. They're always around. I'm not sure if that's healthy. But they're all there.

After having been confined to a television series - and it's a luxury job - where you can't play anything but one particular character for nine months out of the year, it will make you insane. It didn't affect me. I got out quick enough.

Tomorrow it'll all be over, then I'll have to go back to selling pens again.

America is dumb, it's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive.

I suppose nowadays it's all a question of surgery, isn't it? Of course the notion is beautiful, the idea of staying a boy and a child forever, and I think you can. I have known plenty of people who, in their later years, had the energy of children and the kind of curiosity and fascination with things like little children. I think we can keep that, and I think it's important to keep that part of staying young. But I also think it's great fun growing old.

It's absolutely fine when Wile E. Coyote walks in with a band-aid on his head, after a 3,000-pound rock is dropped on him. That is what Ed Wood meant by the suspension of disbelief.

I had never experienced anything like the response I got from people for Pirates of the Caribbean, where you meet a 75-year-old woman who had seen Pirates and somehow related to the character, and then five minutes later you meet a six-year-old who says, 'Oh, you're Captain Jack!' What a rush. What a gift. That was the challenge with Wonka, too--to be, in a sense, like Bugs Bunny. I find it magical that a three-year-old can be mesmerized by Bugs, but so can a 40-year-old or an 80-year-old. It's a great challenge to see if you can appeal to that huge an age range.