If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they're talking.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.

There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze.