Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.

The most precious things in speech are the pauses.

Acting: An art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.

Acting is a strange business; one day it's there, and the next day nowhere to be seen.

You've got to perform in a role hundreds of times. In keeping it fresh one can become a large, madly humming, demented refrigerator.

Dead? No excuse for laying off work.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.

I like talking to engineers best. They built bridges, they're very precise, very disciplined, yet I find they have roving minds.

And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

I like playing around with the words

Truth is for the minority.

Regardless of what we understand or do not understand, we are what we speak. That's how we are known.

In this world, where everything happens so fast, it's hard to sit back, take the time and contemplate.

You can’t kill history. You can’t shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that—if it’s going to die, it has to die on its own

I reject the idea that humans are superior to other life forms. . . Man is just an ape with an overly developed sense of superiority.

A man-of-war is the best ambassador.

You can't cross a sea by merely staring into the water.

Except for its worst inner-city slums, America is not the primitive capitalist jungle of European imagination, where human beings slink away like wounded animals to die in bloodstained holes.