When you perform with a live audience, the audience comes back to you, so that you and the audience are giving to each other, in a sense. It's an extraordinary thing. It's wild turf up there.
It was a compromise. There was a sense that I could write my own memoirs, and Larry [Grobel] would help me down the line, or maybe not, maybe he was too close to me.
Being the actors of the craft, the trade, one of the big things you do and you learn is about repeating. There is something to the repeats. I think that is part of what is healthy to young actors. Get out and learn something just through doing that, repeating.
"To be or not to be is" [by William Shakespeare] beyond anything I can comprehend. I understand it on a superficial level, but the depth of it just boggles my mind. I think it's probably the greatest of all speeches ever written.
We were doing Scarface many years ago...and I remember having my coffee and looking at the beach, the surf, and I saw a hundred people looking out into the ocean. I thought, what's going on? Did some whale get washed up to shore? So I stood up on the table to see what it was, and it was the director, Brian De Palma, standing there alone by the surf and they were all waiting for him. And I never forgot that because it represented to me what a director is, what a director does.
[Ocean's Thirteen] is a great group, and it was an opportunity to work with Steven Soderbergh. But mainly? It was shot in L.A. and I want to be next to my kids. So I've been doing everything that has to do with being next to them, close to them.
There was once a great actor named George C. Scott. He was on stage in the Delacourt Theater in Central Park, where they do Shakespeare every summer, and he was playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. At one point he took the robes he was wearing and just started flipping them up in the air, out of nowhere. And later, an actor said to him, "What was that, George, what were you doing?" And he said, "They were sleeping." You're always trying to catch them.
I went back to the stage because it was my way of dealing with the success I had, my way of coping. It was a way of escaping the responsibilty of what was happening.
I was playing a part of someone dealing dope on a street corner - and there was a guy actually dealing heroin right there. I looked at him, he looked at me, and I got real confused.
I was watching Revolution, and the things I did in that picture, holy smokes! I can't believe I did that, it's like another person. It's the thought of it, it's just appalling to me.