You never know who's going to be in the audience. You never know who is going to be hearing that piece for the first time, and you never know who is going to be hearing that piece for the last time.

I was never really a character actor - I was a leading man who was always cast as a character. I wanted to be Jack Nicholson or Jean Gabin.

The arts are not simply skills: their concern is the intellectual, ethical, and spiritual maturity of human life. And in a time when religious and political institutions are so busy engraving images of marketable gods and candidates that they lose their vision of human dignity, the arts have become the custodians of those values which most worthily difine humanity, which most sensitively define Divinity.

There's no future in being poor.

My taxes alone keep eight lawyers busy, and when I finally get my money, its only one-third of what I earn. With the kids in school and my other responsibilities, I get no change back from the first million dollars. The money flows out like water.

Success lasts only three seconds. After that you're the same as you were before you had it.

You never know who's going to be in the audience. You never know who is going to be hearing that piece for the first time, and you never know who is going to be hearing that piece for the last time.