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

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.

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.

Fear of failure impedes adequate self-identification

Selfishness is a giant in destruction of relationships.

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan you should wear it inside where it functions best.

I hate cheating. I won’t put up with it. I don’t do it myself.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

I don't want to be rich and I don't want to be famous.

What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one's subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one's subject - these are important questions.

In the spiritual life, as in all organic processes, everyone has their optimum and it is just as harmful to go beyond it as not to attain it.

You can't push a wave onto the shore any faster than the ocean brings it in.

You have to decide when it is time to move on. I was dancing on Broadway for many years. Then everyone was either getting injured or retiring and I was dancing with younger dancers.