“The city is full of terrible actors. That is what historians never say about Madras, it is filled with hams.”

“If there is a streak of ham anywhere in an actor, Shakespeare will bring it out.”

“I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What’s called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary.”

“What history is not biased? Show me a historian, a real historian who is not biased!...History is never objective.”

“Who me? God, no, I'm terrible . . . " Then, just as an experiment, I say, "And, besides, I don't think I'm good-looking enough to be an actor." Oh, that's not true! There are lots of actors who aren't good-looking . . .”

“You can say what you want about the Germans being full of "kunst", but what they are really full of is delicatessen.”