I'm constantly striving to break through to something new. You try to maintain a neutral approach to your work, and not be too hard on yourself.

Our life is looking forward or looking back, that's it. Where is the moment?

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

I was playing a part of someone dealing dope on a street corner -- and there was a guy actually dealing heroin right there. I looked at him, he looked at me, and I got real confused.

The literal, basic thing of the stage is really like a magnet. It brings me back to earth.

Great directors can understand the staging in such a way that can make a scene come alive. Others have a certain way of pacing the scene.

The fruit falls off the tree. You don't shake it off before it's ready to fall.

I'm an actor, and everything about me -- the way I perceive things, the way I have seen the world -- has been in relation to characters and how I would want to play something or not play it.

I wanted to be a baseball player, naturally, but I wasn't good enough. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I just had a kind of energy, I was a fairly happy kid.

It's never really that much fun for me to do movies anyway, because you -- you know, you have to get up very early in the morning and you have to go in and you spend a lot of time waiting around.

Doing Shakespeare once is not fair to the play. I have been in Shakespeare plays when it's not until the last two or three performances when I even understand certain things. In the old days star actors would travel the world doing the same parts over and over again.

I didn't go for the needle at all. I never cared for drugs, because I saw what they did to most people. I thought that was the end of the road.

It's so funny when people who are not used to making movies get into it. You just can't believe how insufferably boring it is. Waiting around and doing these lines over and over and finally having to go in and loop the lines and dub them.

My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman. Really, I didn't know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother.

To be or not to be is by William Shakespeare beyond anything I can comprehend. I understand it on a superficial level, but the depth of it just boggles my mind. I think it's probably the greatest of all speeches ever written.

Being the actors of the craft, the trade, one of the big things you do and you learn is about repeating. There is something to the repeats. I think that is part of what is healthy to young actors. Get out and learn something just through doing that, repeating.

Either I act or I die.

I come from the South Bronx -- a true descendant of the melting pot. I grew up in a really mixed neighborhood; it was a very integrated life.

You need some insecurity if you're an actor. It keeps the pot boiling. I haven't yet started to think about retiring. I was shocked when I heard about Paul Newman retiring at age 82. Most actors just fade away like old soldiers.

There was a time in my life when being dishonest with women was the natural way to be. I finally said, Hey, I have to stop this silliness.