One out of 100 citizens of the U.S. is going to prison, and it's not that the system is making criminals, it's that it's making criminals better criminals. We're breeding them like rats and it has to change.

Doing my first movie, I realized I could get into real bad habits. If you're the star, all you have to do is show up, and 20 people say, 'Do you want anything? What is it? Let me get it for you.' Believe me, you get spoiled very quickly. I saw some of my contemporaries allow themselves to have that fame, thinking they could handle it. It messed them up.

I don't think of my life as a cliche, but I'm a cliche eccentric. Complete with a strange name - I mean, who's named Val? How many Vals do you know? I mean, really?

I never cultivated a personality. Almost everyone who is really famous has cultivated a personality.

In order to be an artist and an actor, like tackling the classics in the theater as well as film, there's lots of discipline, lots of work, physical work put in.

The audience and I have an intimacy that is, I believe, rare, most times out.

Mark Twain had a way of telling stories that shifts your consciousness away from labels.