I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.
The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Don’t give them what you think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.
My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society, you see?
We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.
When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.
I am just a plain Jew; I mean have no training.
I'm a minister, and I serve as a minister in addition to being a university professor.
You don't want to see things as they are because your ego would have to admit that things outside yourself are necessary for the self to be. You still have fun, as most people do, from manipulating things.
I think as working actors, it's like sales. You're only as good as your last sale, so you put your all into something and you just hope that from that you can get your next job.