Quotes

Pauline Kael reviewed The Day of the Locust (1975): "There's nothing specifically wrong with Donald Sutherland's performance. It's just awful." That was the most destructive, stupid piece of criticism I've ever received. I stopped reading reviews after that.

I was up for a great part but they told me: "Sorry, you're the best actor but this part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don't look as if you've ever lived next door to anyone."

When you're working for a good director, you become subjective and submissive. You become his concubine. All that you're seeking is his pleasure.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the house I was living in. From what I understood, he was having an affair with the wife of the man he was designing the house for. That man was very tall. So Wright, short and vain, designs the house in such a way that a tall person couldn't live in it without severe cranial damage. I hit my head *all* the time.

[on his early roles] Well, I was always cast as an artistic homicidal maniac. But at least I was artistic!

[on Jane Fonda] Jane's person is more specific than most of us. She's well disciplined and knows what she wants and where she's going and works objectively to apply all her information to that intention. With Jane, the character and force is embodied in her persona and it's a lovely, delicate and self-deprecating human.

[on Julie Christie] Julie has such a wonderful film presence and fulfills everything I admire in a performer in that she -- more specifically than almost anyone else -- works for the director and recognizes that the film is created by the director in the way Jeanne Moreau did for Louis Malle.

Jennifer Lawrence is as good an actress as you're going to find anywhere. In The Hunger Games (2012), she's playing a character who's a genius in the Shavian sense that Joan of Arc was a genius. And she does it with such clarity. It's incredible to see how clearly that character develops.

on being selected for an Honorary Oscar]I get this call and I don't know the number so I picked it up to tell them never to call me again, but it turns out to be John Bailey who tells me he is calling on behalf of the Academy for which he just got elected President

[on his breakup with Jane Fonda] It was a wonderful relationship right up to the point we lived together.

[on Kate Bush] Barry Richardson, who was the hairdresser on Nicolas Roeg's 'Don't Look Now (1973)', asked me if I'd do a music video with Kate Bush. I told him no and we went on to other conversations. A couple of days later there was a knock on my door. I lived in the Savoy Hotel (in London). On the river. Suite 312. I loved it there. So cosseted. So private. Only the floor butler rang the door. I opened it. There was no one there. I heard a voice saying hello and I looked down. Standing down there was a very small Kate Bush. Barry had told her where I lived. What can you do? She wanted to explain what her video was about. I let her in. She sat down, said some stuff. All I heard was 'Wilhelm Reich'. I'd taken an underground copy of his 'The Mass Psychology of Fascism' with me when I went to film (Bernardo) Bertolucci's 'Novecento' in Parma. Reich's work informed the psychological foundations of Attila Mellanchini, the character Bernardo had cast me to play. Everything about Reich echoed through me. He was there then and now he was here. Sitting across from me in the person of the very eloquent Kate Bush. Synchronicity. Perfect. She talked some more. I said OK and we made "Cloudbusting". She's wonderful, Kate Bush. Wonderful. I love that I did it. (What do I remember) about doing it? I remember being in the car and the hill and them taking me, taking Reich, away and looking back through the back window of the car and seeing her, seeing Reich's son Peter, standing there. And I remember the first morning on set seeing her coming out of her trailer smoking a joint and I cautioned her, saying she shouldn't smoke that, it'd affect her work, and she looked at me for a second and said she hadn't been straight for nine years and I loved her.

I don't think anybody of my generation became an actor to make money. It never occurred to me. I made £8 a week here [on stage in London]. When I starred in a play at the Royal Court, I made £17 a week, that was in 1964.

[on given an honorary Academy Award in 2017] I have to tell you that I have been beset by my mind's unrelenting interrogation of me, demanding if I deserve this. And in that quandary, I finally found peace in the words of the great Benjamin Kubelsky, who is also known as Jack Benny, when he said, as I say to you now: 'I don't deserve this. But I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.