The director's job is full of all sorts of annoyances and details - like how many cars are on the street. Ugh. I don't want it. I like my gig. And I feel that for the next 30 years or so I can keep learning more about it.

I'm interested in playing old ladies because I am becoming one. And I want to become a very good one!

I am a greedy actor in the sense that I like the big bites. Put a big fat steak in front of me, and I will eat it.

A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.

A critic never fights the battle they just go around shooting the wounded.

Both my parents were actors. I was schooled to think that acting was an important social service, that it was something that human beings need.

I don't have a waist: I'm a breadbox on top of legs.

When you look at me you don't immediately imagine a very very glamorous icon, so it's only in the theater that I get to do these experiments. I've been an actor about 51 years now. I've played everything from an 8-year-old black boy to a 72-year-old French matriarch, and they hardly hire you to do that on TV.

You know, my hair is very upsetting to people, but it's upsetting on purpose. It is important to look old so that the young will not be afraid of dying. People don't like old women. We don't honor age in our society, and we certainly don't honor it in Hollywood.

Sweat makes good friendship cement.

I'm sorry I didn't wear paint this morning. I tend not to wear it unless I'm getting highly paid.

Women are usually only interesting to studio executives when they are fecund, between the ages of 15 and 30. I decided to get through the really tough patch, around 50, by just cutting my price and playing ten years older. I didn't want to have to wait until I was an old lady to play one.

I'm not glamorous, I don't have a look, I don't know anything about opera, I have no Italian, and I'm too old.

Love is as strict as acting. If you want to love somebody, stand there and do it. If you don't, don't. There are no other choices.

I don't take part in texting and those other things myself, so I don't really know if people put as much thought into messaging as they used to into writing letters.