“It'd be very difficult to cast me as a ballet dancer. Everybody is, in some sense, controlled by their size and their gender. I'm not going to be allowed to play the part that Denzel Washington plays.”
“I remember playing John Wayne Gacy, serial killer, very sick, neurotic, screwed-up guy. You know what? There's a part of me there, too, and you explore that.”
“I was in high school in 1953 when the Committee of One Million circulated a petition urging that Red China - one third of the world's population - be excluded from the United Nations. And I remember I refused to sign it, at 14 or 15 years old.”
“I've got two artificial knees, I have an artificial shoulder, and I'm reasonably healthy given the damage I've done to myself. Everything hurts.”
“If I could transform my stage life to the movies, I'd be Jack Nicholson.”
“It took a long time for me to have any impact in the business because I didn't look like an actor, I didn't sound like an actor.”
“My father had a good sense of humour about a lot of things, including life, which I think I inherited.”
“No one would ever cast me as an aristocrat. I think the big thing about being an Irish artist is access to melancholy. Especially the American Irish. The availability of loss, some kind of pain, is an important part of who we are. I think my Irishness gave me that.”
“My father was a classic intellectual. From him I learned devotion, and I also learned about the life of the mind.”
“My problem is, if any place I'm sleeping catches on fire, I've got a problem because it takes me 20 minutes to get everything moving in the morning.”