- [speaking in 1976] The heavies in my day were kid's stuff compared to today. Our villains had no redeeming qualities. But there's a new morality today. A villain is a guy with a frailty. Heroes are villains.
- The more takes I do, the worse I get.
- [on his giggling psychopathic killer in his debut film Kiss of Death (1947)] I'd never seen myself on the screen, and when I did, I wanted to shoot myself. That damn laugh of mine! For two years after that picture, you couldn't get me to smile. I played the part the way I did because the script struck me as funny and the part I played made me laugh, the guy was such a ridiculous beast.
- I suppose I wanted to act in order to have a place in the sun. I'd always lived in small towns, and acting meant having some kind of identity.
- It's weird, the effect actors have on an audience. With the [bad guy] roles I played in those early movies, I found that quite a few people wanted to have a go at me.
- It's a bit rough priding oneself that one isn't too bad an actor and then finding one's only remembered for a giggle.
- Marilyn Monroe wanted to be this great star but acting just scared the hell out of her. That's why she was always late--couldn't get her on the set. She had trouble remembering lines. But none of it mattered. With a very few special people, something happens between the lens and the film that is pure magic. And she really had it.
- [in 2001] I'm a lifelong liberal. I've never been a real activist--I just shoot my mouth off. When I knew Ronald Reagan, he was an affable, boring fellow. Now he's an icon. It's incredible. Like half of America, I'm doubly mystified by Reagan's spiritual heir, our current president.
- [in 1976] I know I've made kind of a half-assed career out of violence, but I abhor violence. I am an ardent supporter of gun control. It seems incredible to me that we are the only civilized nation that does not put some effective control on guns.
- Movie audiences fasten on to one aspect of the actor, and then they decide what they want you to be. They think you're playing yourself. The truth is that the only person who can ever really play himself is a baby.
- I could choose the director and my fellow actors. I could carry out projects which I liked but the studios didn't want. The businessmen who run Hollywood today have no self-respect. What interests them is not movies but the bottom line. Look at Dumb and Dumber (1994), which turns idiocy into something positive, or Forrest Gump (1994), a hymn to stupidity. 'Intellectual' has become a dirty word.
- When I see people destroying their privacy--what they think, what they feel--by beaming it out to millions of viewers, I think it cheapens them as individuals.
- [on Spencer Tracy] What an actor should be is exemplified, for me, by him. I like the reality of his acting. It's so honest and seems so effortless, even though what Tracy does is the result of damn hard work and extreme concentration. Actually, the ultimate in any art is never to show the wheels grinding. The essence of bad acting, for example, is shouting. Tracy never shouts. He's the greatest movie actor there ever was.
- I won't have a gun in my house.
- Many of my friends were blacklisted. America should be ashamed forever.
- [upon receiving the D.W. Griffith Award for Lifetime Achievment in 1990] It's my second award. The other was for sight reading in the eighth grade.
- [1986 interview, on his Kiss of Death (1947) character Tommy Udo] Ben Hecht wrote the script. I don't know whether he had indicated the laugh or whether I did it out of nervousness. I think it was probably a combination. [Director Henry Hathaway] liked it and said, "We could use a little more of that".
- [on Movie Madness (1982)] What a disaster! Who directed that? Oh, Henry Jaglom. Enough said!
- [on Hanky Panky (1982)] That went down the tunnel; but I never had so much fun on a dog.
- [In a 1971 N.Y. Times interview] I don't care how well known an actor is - he can still live a normal life, if he wants to. I still believe it. That's the trouble with actors. If they're not recognized, they think it's all over.
- [in 1985, on Henry Hathaway] Through the years Henry and I became very close friends. We did a few pictures together, and he was always tough as nails. Off the set he was a charmer; on the set, he was Hitler!
- [in 1986, on Darryl F. Zanuck] We weren't crazy about each other. He wasn't my cup of tea; he was a first-rate administrator, but a little Napoleon. He had gemutlich with writers and with directors, but no sympathy at all for actors. Of all the moguls, Zanuck was the only one who could make a film. He was a good utter. I didn't admire the type of fellow he was. So I was never invited to Palm Springs--or all that nonsense. We had a business relationship, and it worked out very well.
- [in 1988, on director William Keighley] Bill Keighley was a very nice man, an elegant gut; he was married to an actress named Genevieve Tobin. He had been with [Darryl F. Zanuck] for years over at Warners. Directed oodles of gangster movies, but he himself was a drawing room type of fellow.
- [in 1986 interview, on Marilyn Monroe] She was a vulnerable kid. Murder to work with because she was scared to death of acting--even when she became a big movie actress. We had a hell of a time getting her out of the dressing room. When it was five o'clock, it got irritating: "C'mon, Marilyn, we want to go home!" She was a movie animal. Something happened between the lens and the film. Nobody knew what the hell it was. On the set, you'd think: "Oh, this is impossible; you can't print this". You'd see it, and she's got everyone backed off the screen. [Laurence Olivier] said the same thing. She had that phenomenal something! Nobody knows what it is, but she had it. She certainly was never a professional actress. She always had a coach with her, lurking in the background, giving her signals. And she could never remember three words in a row--so it was all piece-work. Beyond all the technical deficiencies, she was a nice girl. We got along fine.
- [on not re-signing with Fox after seven years] I didn't sign a new contract because I was tired of being shot from one movie to another--finishing one on a Saturday and starting another on Monday. I could get more money on the outside and get a wider variety of stuff.
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