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 regret anything. I feel like I've made what I would call mistakes. I picked the wrong movie, or I didn't pursue a character, but everything you do is part of you and you get something from it.
I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it, I destroy it because it's no longer coming from my unconscious.
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.
The play is the source, it is orchestrated with words. In a movie, you are not dealing with as much as that. There are machines and wires. When you're acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back.
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.
I don't think actors should ever expect to get a role, because the disappointment is too great. You've got to think of things as an opportunity. An audition's an opportunity to have an audience.
I' ve won awards. And they didn't make me feel bad winning them. They made me feel pretty good. But it also did not make me feel bad NOT winning the Academy Award.
Jamie Foxx does a good rendition of me. It's a real gift, mimicry of that kind, the tonal thing. It's sort of like having a talent for playing an instrument.
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.
At this point in my career, I don't have to deal with audition rejections. So I get my rejection from other things. My children can make me feel rejected. They can humble you pretty quick.
I haven't encouraged [Julia Marie Pacino] or discouraged her. I let her go her own way. I did say to her that I thought that she had a real gift, and it's a good idea to know that. It's always good to go with your gift.