I wanted to be a baseball player, naturally, but I wasn't good enough. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I just had a kind of energy, I was a fairly happy kid.
I don't like a lot of things like [Iraq], I never did. Being in a position of celebrity and having your words carry such unnatural weight...I've always been a bit squeamish when it came to that kind of thing.
That's where humour lives for me. In the body. The Steve Martin kind of stuff or Jim Carrey, that's what I like. I've always felt that's what I would like to do.
My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman. Really, I didn't know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother.
Acting is hard work. At times, it's very energizing and enervating. It's childish. It's also responsible. It's illuminating, enriching, joyful, drab. It's bizarre, diabolical. It's exciting.
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 had these little babies [my twins] and it gave me something so spectacular, such a feeling - I was so turned on and so excited by them that I wrote a poem. I had it on scraps of paper and the maid threw it out.
You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse; grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God... and where can you go from there?
The thing is doing it, that's what it's all about. Not in the results of it. After all what is a risk? It's a risk not to take risks. Otherwise, you can go stale and repeat yourself. I don't feel like a person who takes risks. Yet there's something within me that must provoke controversy because I find it wherever I go. Anybody who cares about what he does takes risks.
My movies are always being played on television, I'm very well known and all that stuff - I go all over the world, I have access to many things, many people, many places and it's wonderful. But now I'm at a point where...I thought it was time to show some of it, to show some of my feelings about things and what I preferred at the time. I prefer them still but not to the extent I did at the time.
When I was a younger actor, I would try to keep it serious all day. But I have found, later on, that the lighter I am about things when I'm going to do a big scene that's dramatic and takes a lot out of you, the better off I am when I come to it.