I've never been competitive with other actors. I've been competitive with myself and I'm my own worst critic, a terrible critic I am, and unless I get something right, I feel very unhappy.

Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.

I have never seen it (Jaws 4) but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built and it is terrific.

...some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

It’s a lesson in life—don’t look back, you’ll trip over.

I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.

Obsession is a young man's game, and my only excuse is that I never grew old.

Some men just want to watch the world burn

I've always got to have one impossible dream on the back burner.

Use the difficulties - if you can't avoid them

The first actor I ever saw was The Lone Ranger. I thought: "That's what I want to do."

A sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.

If we wish ourselves to be high, we should treat that which is over us as high.

Guests can be, and often are, delightful, but they should never be allowed to get the upper hand.

The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture.

I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.

We are never prepared for what we expect.

Elephants don't know anything about the world of ants; the peaks of mountains are oblivious of what is happening on the plains!

Coleman Jacoby and Arnie Rosen won an Emmy and Mel Brooks didn't! Niezsche was right! There is no God! There is no God!

A play gets on Broadway by fluke. And you don't even start out with that ambition. When I do a play, the intention is just to put it up somewhere.

If we miss this chance to make a fresh start, we may look back on this moment from some later vantage point and realize how much that failure cost us all.