My brothers went to work at 12 and put themselves through school and brought the family out of ruin into food and clothing.

I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.

I try to give my work everything I've got, because when you're dead or you're out of the business or you're in an old actors' home somewhere, if you've done a good job, your work will still be 16 years old and dancing and healthy and pirouetting and arabesquing all over the place. And they'll say, "That's who he is! He's not this decaying skeleton."

Creative people should always be striving, they should always be hungry, they should be looking for the next place to go.

In real life people fart, in the movies, people don't. Why not? Farts are a repressed minority. The mouth gets to say all kinds of things, but the other place is supposed to keep quiet. But maybe our lower colons have something interesting to say. Maybe we should listen to them. Farts are human, more human than a lot of people I know. I think we should bring them out of the water closet and into the parlor.

The only weapon I've got is comedy

When you get big special effects pictures, sci-fi and things, there's little or no comedy. Or it's a domestic comedy and there's not one special effect. But very rarely do these things fuse and come out right.