I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God’s business.

Zoos are becoming facsimiles – or perhaps caricatures – of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.

Pain is temporary, film is forever.

I didn’t want o do metal work and get my hands all nicked up and be around guys. So I took drama because there were a lot of girls.

I’m also very proud to be a part of a trilogy of films that, if they do nothing else, allow people to check their problems at the door, sit down and have a good time.

The laughs mean more to me than the adoration. If two girls walk up to me and one says ‘you’re cute’, I’ll say thank you, but I appreciate it much more when the other one says ‘you make me laugh so much’.

You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don’t know what I want. I don’t want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.

I don’t want people to kick my ass, I just want to get to a point where they can’t kick it.

Everybody in the world knew I was before I knew who I was.

The only thing worse than an opportunity you don’t deserve is blowing an opportunity.

Tracy is more a help to me than I am to her.

You’ve probably read in People that I’m a nice guy – but when the doctor first told me I had Parkinson’s, I wanted to kill him.

In my 50s I’ll be dancing at my children’s weddings.

I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn’t nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It’s got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.

I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the opportunity to make those three films that didn’t do well. They were really important to me, and the things I learned doing them were important to me.

After a year or so I really thought I was Howard Hughes. Here I was at eighteen years old, getting all these checks.

I’m going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.

I got sick of turning on the TV and seeing my face.

I love the irony. I’m perceived as being really young and yet I have the clinical condition of an old man.

I’m kind of private and I keep things inside a lot, but it’s been so wonderful to realize that people care about you in a very deep way and that there is some bond between an actor and his audience. I don’t even know how to describe that feeling.

I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God’s business.

I worked very hard on those movies but there was some creative connection that wasn’t being made.

One’s dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.

What other people think about me is not my business.

If I were overweight because I ate too much, I would have far more of a complex. I would know if I just stopped eating and showed a little discipline I would be thin. But there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about being short. You just gotta run with it.

Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.

Family is not an important thing, it’s everything.