Tell the politicians and the hustlers: live and let live.
A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.
That's what we're all looking for, the place where the work leads us.
One of the things you can do as an actor, is compensate for the things you can't do in life.
I decided a long time ago but sometimes it takes you 40 years to get around to doing something - and that's the truthful answer.
In terms of the stars, the only ones I cast were Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins. I was in Los Angeles working and a lot of this took place on the telephone. I'd met Maggie [Smith] once and I'd come back-stage, which I'm usually loathe to do because as an actor you don't want people coming back because you want to get home [laughs].
The Academy Awards are obscene, dirty. . . no better than a beauty contest.
And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
I think continually of those who were truly great. . . Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with their honor.
I have no doubt that aggressively going after wrongdoing can result in real improvement. Fewer wrongdoers in city government means more honest employees; it means better city services; it means more efficient government. And punishing wrongdoing can have a strong ripple effect that deters others from going down the wrong path.