I remember little things that break my heart. We were coming out of Michael's house one day, and he noticed my shoelaces were undone. He bent down and tied them. I almost cried. To me, it was such a gesture of love.

My mother, we were a very poor family. When I was a kid, we would be in our little room, and there would be a knock on the door almost every night with a hobo begging for food. Even though we didn't even have enough to eat, my mother always found something to give them.

When I made Spartacus during the McCarthy Era, we were losing our freedom. It was an awful, awful way. McCarthy saw Communists everywhere, in every level of government and they concentrated on Hollywood and especially on Hollywood writers.

You haven't learned how to live until you've learned how to give.

I have been trying to create a campaign to have our country make an apology for slavery, for the way that blacks were treated before the Civil War and after the Civil War.

I bought the book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I paid to have it made into a play and I played in it for six months. I came back and I tried to make it into a movie, without success.

I'm a loner clear down deep to my guts.