Los Angeles is a weird mixture of every influence that Europe has dropped in its melting pot. It is hot, arid, picturesque, seething, banal, sometimes plain pleasant, and sometimes awesome.
When I write about working-class people, I do so in ways that reveal them at their absolute, magnificent worst.
If you want to be an actor, you must have total, ruthless commitment to your art. Don't be ambitious for fame or TV or movies. Art is a jealous mistress and will brook no competitors. Study all the time. Never stop reading. Never stop learning speeches. It will fill you up - define and refine you.
You are treated like a cog in a machine. The director might be obsessing so much with the stunts that he doesn't notice your performance, and the producer may just be an insane money man, but I have no snobbery about the movies.
I may be 80, but I intend to keep acting until the day I die. Instead of slowing down, I've discovered my second wind.
The great actors we had came from the actor-manager theaters. Not only did they create a team, they were the generals working with the soldiers.
I liked Stanley Kubrick from the start. He had a warm, benign nature and offered himself to you as a friend and ally. He seemed to possess no airs or attitudes, neuroses, or predilection towards tantrums.
My mother was almost entirely responsible for my cultural education. She took me to the library once a week, and by the age of seven, I was reading 100 books a year.
That is the nature of the British psyche. It's very blunt, plain, very linear. It's pragmatic: it records life as it is.
In London, nobody comments on what you wear - they think that's not important to you or your state of well-being.
A knighthood would be a bit too much. An OBE or an MBE or whatever they are called, one of those would be more elegant.
When I started studying acting, I was enamoured of actors who used movement to enhance the language.