I worked with Lawrence Olivier some years ago. He was a great mentor.

I will not play just an evil part. In fact, I got offered $7 million several years ago to play the part that Faye Dunaway played in ‚Supergirl.‘ I was kind of insulted. I was impressed with the money, but I said, ‚Why are you asking me to play an evil witch? Do I come across as an evil witch to you?‘

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.

Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That’s when you know the most, you’ve seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore.

Perception often lags behind reality, and I can say from experience that the vast majority of public officials in Louisiana are much better than our reputation holds us to be.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

While still working for others, your goal at some point must be to carve out little areas that you can operate on your own, cultivating entrepreneurial skills.

I’m a career prosecutor. I have been trained, and my experience over decades, is to make decisions after a review of the evidence and the facts. And not to jump up with grand gestures before I’ve done that. Some might interpret that as being cautious. I would tell you that’s just responsible.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

I won’t have to do any major changes to continue my career a long way, hopefully. Just hopefully stay healthy and be able to help a team out as I go through and still play at a pretty high level.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

I’ve been doing comedy longer than I haven’t been doing comedy, as I was performing for three years before I even got on ‚The Tonight Show.‘ There’s truly nothing like it; it’s intense and exhilarating, even though it looks so casual.

I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

Sitting idle at home is the most painful experience for a footballer.

At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.

I enjoy acting when you really hit it right.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that’s exactly what I did.

If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it’s an incomparable experience.

Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.

All I have to say is basically if performing, singing, acting, and dancing is what you want to do, then you just have to do it – no matter where it is.

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

I seem to be getting a lot of things pushed my way that are strong women. It’s like people see Hackers and they send me offers to play tough women with guns, the kind who wear no bra and a little tank top. I’d like to play strong women who are also very feminine.

There’s one advantage in having been around as long as I have. Everybody in the Senate knows me, and – I’m going to say something presumptuous, to repeat myself – I think most respect me.

I was a journeyman chef of middling abilities. Whatever authority I have as a commenter on this world comes from the sheer weight of 28 years in the business. I kicked around for 28 years and came out the other end alive and able to form a sentence.

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.

Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

I always play women I would date.

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

I’ve been fortunate. I don’t pick scripts. Scripts pick me.

I’ve been everywhere in the world, seen everything, had everything a man can have.

Find what’s hot, find what’s just opened and then look for the worst review of the week. There is so much to learn from watching a restaurant getting absolutely panned and having a bad experience. Go and see it for yourself.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

Didn’t get promoted? Good. More time to get better.

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.

I’m not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.

So I’ve seen life as one long learning process. And if I see – you know, if I fly on somebody else’s airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn’t in – 21 years ago, then I’d think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I’d like to fly on.

Michelle Pfeiffer hasn’t been finding a lot of work recently because she doesn’t like what a woman her age is offered. That’s a real double standard. You get Sean Connery, who gets older and older, still playing opposite young ladies, but it doesn’t work the other way around.

I’m proud to be an actor. See, as an actor, you live longer. Football players, the brain and all that stuff, ooh-eee, that’s not good.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

I think Himalayan climbers tend to mature fairly late. I think most of the successful Himalayan climbers have ranged from 28 to just over 40, really.

My role 14 years ago in Richard III – that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it – they have all the fun!

What I do is just go over and over and over my lines and learn the script so well that I can just be easy and relaxed. That’s the way I always work.

I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

It’s a great, great experience to finally get the reception that you know you rightfully deserve.

I got started as an actor when I was 12.