The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays.

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind.

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

When you stand on the stage you must have a sense that you are addressing the whole world, and that what you say is so important the whole world must listen.

You have to do something. If you do something, you become somebody. Even a daffodil does something, has a profession. It gives off scent, professionally.

You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences.

You'll begin to act when you can forget your technique - when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously.

You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing.

Actors need a kind of aggression, a kind of inner force. Don't be only one-sided, sweet, nice, good. Get rid of being average. Find the killer in you.

Happy children should not try to be artists. You have to be born with a broken heart and a sense of loneliness inside. I never had a happy moment as a child myself.

Often I wish this would all be over, Liesel, but then somehow you do something like walk down the basement steps with a snowman in your hands.

In prayer the lips ne'er act the winning part without the sweet concurrence of the heart.

There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.

A good friend of mine was Lucy Ball. Her mother and my mother were best friends.

People are either good or they're not. Religion doesn't make anybody good, I don't think.

Either you are a victim or you victimize someone and in the hood it's no holds barred. The kid in the schoolyard that doesn't want to fight always leaves with a black eye.

My vision of a 'new world order' foresees a United Nations with a revitalized peacekeeping function.

If you want to experience miracles, you have to believe before seeing.

I'll tell you what pressure is. Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse. Playing cricket is not.

Hollywood does not write parts for people like me, an elderly gentleman, and when they find out you're crippled, forget about it. No, I'll never work again.