I am able to play monsters well. I understand monsters. I understand madmen.
Things have changed so much now. Everything is downloaded onto computers. I’m not a computer-savvy guy, but with downloading the movie industry has changed.
People don’t always tell you what they are thinking. They just see to it that you don’t advance in life.
I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one’s nature. Have fun with it and you know, it is to accept everything about ourselves.
I don’t push my luck. I don’t worry about the results and therefore everything seems to work out well. That’s something I’ve learnt over the years. The whole thing about the acting business is that it’s a hit-or-miss game so I keep my distance from it.
If you don’t follow through on your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable.
The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.
You have to be pretty tough to be an actor, and you have to be pretty certain what you want. You can’t waffle through this business.
If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.
People ask me how did you choose the part and how did you prepare for this work? I just learned the lines and showed up; I don’t know what else to say because that’s all I know how to do.
Sometimes I feel tired and think I ought to give it up, I don’t want to just retire. No, I enjoy it all and you just keep going until the day comes when you can’t do it anymore. And that’s what I want to do.
We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist.
Israel means war and destruction and we Americans are behind this war and I am ashamed of being American.
There’s a thing that if you – somebody in faith is always troubled by doubt, and somebody by doubt is always wanted by faith. So it’s a kind of paradox.
My life has been a kind of mystery to me. By all my logical, linear thinking I started out in school as a little boy, I didn’t have a clue about anything. What they were talking about in school, couldn’t play sports, couldn’t learn, and I was bottom of the class.
I’m just an actor. It’s the way the script is written, and it’s easy. I don’t have think about it. When you receive the script, you know pretty well how to play it, apart from little technicalities like the accent.
I’ve always been hopeless at everything when I was a kid. That’s why I became an actor – ’cause I couldn’t do anything else.
Oh, the truth, oh yeah, lot of trouble that got us into, didn’t it, over the last maybe thousand years? Hitler knew the truth, so did Stalin, so did Mao Zedong, so did the Inquisition. They all knew the truth and that caused such horror. Certainty is the enemy.
Guilt is the thief of life.
Acting is constricted because you have the lines. But I improvise with it and what I learn on the set. I improvise rhythms and just changes.