I've passed up opportunities. I've avoided the spotlight. I've never been to Academy Awards, didn't relate to them.
I worked with the best directors - Martin Scorsese, John Huston, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock. Alfred Hitchcock was great.
I used to sing when I was six years old. When the family would leave the house, I'd get up on the stool and sing. 'T for Texas, T for Tenessee, T for Thelma, the gal that made a wreck out of me.' I was in love with my babysitter. She was 18. I was six.
I sang barber shop harmony and sort of got into performing. And it just came naturally. Then, when I was in college after the war, I did a play, 'Pygmalion,' by George Bernard Shaw. And from then on, I knew that's what I wanted to do.
To put it mildly, I was just a very late bloomer.
I would've preferred to blossom earlier in life.
I'm tired of playing people who are complete washouts and bums. I don't mind waiting for the good ones to come along. It's like age. It's never bothered me. I've even forgot my birthday. Many times I've wondered if I should tell my real age, but now I think it's an honor, to be doing what I'm doing now at my age.
Casting is a convoluted kind of trip. No one likes to be typed - even if you're a cab driver, or whatever you do.
I was offered a series by John Carpenter after I did the movie 'Christine,' and I would've been a leading man after that. I would have played a private investigator. And I was offered a great deal - I would be involved in the direction, casting, everything, and whatever. It was whatever an actor wants, and I didn't take it.
My father and mother were not that compatible. I don't think they had a good wedding night, and I was the product of that. We weren't close.
I've got a pretty iconoclastic attitude about all institutions myself. And I just think the church was corrupted right after Christ was killed.
I've worked with some of the best of them. Not just directors like Sam Peckinpah and David Lynch, but writers like Sam Shepard and singers like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson.
The first film I ever remember - I think my mother took me to it - was called 'She Married Her Boss' with Melvyn Douglas.
You can do stuff onstage that you can't do offstage. You can be angry as hell and enraged and get away with it onstage, but not off.
Everything changes every day.
My favorite films are 'Paris, Texas' and 'Repo Man.'
I just wasn't psychologically made to get married or, God forbid, be a father.
I like to stay home and watch television. The Game Show channel, mostly.
I watch television. Game shows - I hate the hosts and the people on them, and I love the questions and the answers.
I've never seen a Western that was really truthful. Most are just morality plays. Good guys and bad guys - and the good guys always win, whereas in reality, most of the sheriffs were as bad as the gangsters they were after.
