If you go away on location for three months and your wife stays at home, you've made a whole new load of friends and she's made a whole new load of friends and you get home and you're kind of strangers.
By the time the Oscars are on I'll be seventy. How many more chances am I going to have to get nominated for an Oscar?
I regard the theater as a woman I loved dearly who treated me like dirt.
If I work with a bad actor, my reaction is to immediately become worse than they are.
I'm a sort of boy next door. If that boy has a good scriptwriter.
I don't meet stockbrokers or carpenters or coal miners; I spend all day with actors, composers and photographers.
I love the start of autumn when the trees in my garden change the colour of their leaves in one last dazzling display.
I just love to go home, no matter where I am, the most luxurious hotel suite in the world, I love to go home.
The three actors I admire the most are all dead. Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy and the French actor, Jean Gabin. They're all very natural, sort of masculine without being overly macho.
When I was a young actor I was in a lot of film doing one day work and two days' work, and they've included all those titles, which I don't even remember. I think I've played the lead in about 75 movies.
I don't work very much, and I just sit here waiting for a script that I can't refuse - and I'm not talking about money.
When you're a movie star and you're young, you are always playing someone who's a better fighter, a better lover, a better everything than you.
For me, the performance was always playing different people. And so when I got older, was no longer the romantic leading movie star, it became more and more interesting for me, the characters I played, you know?
To disappear your complete self into a character is quite difficult. I've tried it 85 times, and I've succeeded two or three times.
In my early days, I didn't know what a good film or a bad film was, and I was trying to make some money. As it happens I was lucky. I made some good films.
My own mentality is that I've retired. They send me these scripts and if I absolutely have to do it, then I go to work.
January is the garbage can of movies in America, directly after all the Oscar contenders have been out.
I'm trying to work only with established, respected directors. I took a lot of bad scripts and worked for a lot of lazy directors, and it was discouraging to go to the screenings and see that the director had added nothing, the editor had added nothing, there was nothing to see.
Presenting the Oscars was the most nerve-racking job I have ever done in show business. It's very much a live show: they have comedy writers waiting in the wings, and as you come off between presentations, they hand you an appropriate gag to tell.
Funny things happen to you in movies for silly reasons.
Someone said to me the other day: "Well, you're eventually going to live until 110." And I said: "Well, who's going to keep me? What age do I retire? 100?" How are you going to live all those years and who is going to keep you doing it? I have a couple of grandchildren now so I'm banking on them.
If I see any injustice done, I have a big enough mouth and the position to open up about it.
Growing up, there was only classical music on BBC Radio. We had to listen to the American Forces Network in Germany, which played pop songs, or the pirate radio boats off the coast.
If you're a movie star, you get the girl, you lose the girl, and then you get her back. But if you're a character like me, you lose the girl, then you get another one, then you get another one, then you lose them all, then you lose your life.
The Quiet American is anti the people who took them into the Vietnam War.
