Where I come from, being a hard man is being able to take a good beating and then get back up again and carry on fighting.

Boxers are very isolated - or isolated within their own camps.

Julian Schnabel painted a picture that he dedicated to my character in Rumble Fish. It was called The Motorcycle Boy. I remember when he brought it over to me at the Mayflower Hotel [in New York] years ago. This is when you and I knew each other.

I'm an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone . . .

Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.

It's always been the case that you have the really rich, and the really poor. But hey, look, all the great empires have their periods where they rule the world, and then they crumble.

Actors should shut up about politics. They tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour of-the-month liberal.