There was a kind of stigma against Italians when we first started coming over to America, and it only escalated when World War II started.

 

I ran with a crew that included my 3 best friends, Cliffy, Bruce, and Petey. Every day was a fresh adventure. We were on the prowl, hungry for life. In hindsight I realized I might have had more love from my family than the other 3 did. I think that might have made all the difference. I made it out alive, and they didn’t.

 

I smiled, too, because we knew we were alive. The day was full of potential. Something was going to happen.

 

Where I came from, we were always either being chased or doing the chasing.

 

I didn’t think of myself as disadvantaged – it was just another block in the neighbourhood, another tribe.

​

I’m still here because of my mother. Of course that’s who I have to thank, and I never thanked her for it. She’s the one who kept a lid on all of this, who parried me away from the path that led to delinquency, danger, and violence, the needle, that lethal delight called heroin that killed my 3 closest friends. Petey, Cliffy, Bruce – they all died from drugs. I was not exactly under strict surveillance, but my mother paid attention to where I was in a way that my friends’ families didn’t, and we all knew it. I believe she saved my life.

 

When you lose your father, you’re always looking for one in some way.

 

“How come you made it and I didn’t? I always wanted to.” I would tell them, “You wanted to. I had to.”

​

Go to acting class. Have an audience. Show yourself that you can do the part. But don’t listen to the teachers. You have to be careful. Take what they say and use only what you identify with; just use that. There are no rules, because when it comes right down to your performance, it doesn’t matter what most people think. Your intuition should not be swayed by the audience, but by your own imagination and your willingness to go into yourself and express what’s there.

 

I knew that in a few more years I was going to be able to help. It’s one thing to think it, but how do you tell anyone that you’re destined to be successful? Who would believe you?

​

I had no education and no desire to have more. I was interested in one thing. I believed I was an artist.

 

As an actor, your performance is always a reflection of how you feel about things. Not just what’s on the page but whatever you are feeling in the moment – your issues, as we might call them today. And you don’t always know what you feel until you’re in the scene and delivering the lines. But what you’re doing is always an expression of yourself.

 

In this business, you’re up, you’re down, and you’re up again… I was getting used to the seesaw of show business. All actors experience it.

 

Marty said, “I’m not gonna make you a star, you are a star.” I didn’t look at myself that way, but he did.

 

But when you run on impulse, impulse does sometimes bail you out. People say I take risks, and I don’t want to sound like I’m boasting here, but when something’s up, I don’t care.

​

What if they’d fired me, would I have felt I lost out on something? Probably, but I had lost out on things before and recovered. I didn’t consider it important to have a career. I never thought about careers.

 

I could never watch myself on-screen while other people were watching me. It was a bit disconcerting and it made me shy, almost embarrassed. As a younger actor, I guess I needed attention and didn’t want it at the same time. It’s a bit of a paradox.

 

Fame, as my friend Heathcote Williams said, is the perversion of the natural human instinct for validation and attention. It was so ephemeral and so strange.

 

After The Godfather, they would have let me play anything. They offered me the role of Han Solo in Star Wars.

​

Don’t even do it if you’re not going to do it the way it’s supposed to be done.

 

What goes into a play is everything. If you don’t have the right set, the right cast, the right atmosphere, you’ve got nothing. Even if it’s Shakespeare.

 

The thing about acting is, you don’t really do it and yet it’s real. That’s the phenomenon. That’s the paradox. We actors have to go through it to find it in ourselves, so we can paint it. 

​

I started to wonder, Do I deserve this great gift of celebrity that’s been given to me? Where is the acceptance in all of this? How do you live with the feeling that you don’t fit in with other people when you already feel like you don’t fit in with yourself? That’s a tough one to sort out.

 

Work was always first. It was what gave me identity and solace, made me feel I was closer to who I am.

 

I’ve felt it throughout my career. The star gets labelled as being difficult. Now what is difficult? Someone is saying, I’m interested in making this film. I’m interested in how we build the world of the film and how it comes through. The people shelling out the dough say we’re driving them crazy when we do this stuff, but this is our sanity. We do it for the sake of film. If you’re fighting for the betterment of the film, then you’re not being difficult. You’re not on a film for perks. The size of a trailer, 14 assistants, lunch breaks every 5 minutes, demands that bear no relationship to the work you-re doing – that’s being difficult.

​

I already don’t function well in controversies, especially when you’re the so-called movie star, and you’re assumed to have all the power, but you really don’t. I’ve always thought that the best thing to do is to be quiet in those situations, because once you start yapping, it gets worse. You have to take the punches. It’s the nature of the beast.

 

Scarface was a flop – not commercially, but critically. Artistically. Spiritually. 

​

I didn’t understand how money worked, any more than I understood how a career worked. It was a language I just didn’t speak.

 

As I found out in Hollywood, sometimes not wanting something is the best way of getting it.

 

Actors, man – there’s nothing like actors. Back then and right now, they are the greatest of humans. I know they call ‘em crazy, self-centered, all that stuff. We even accuse them of narcissism. How foul. Are you saying people who have self-interest are narcissists? Give me a break – we all fit that description. They are what they were 200 years ago, fucking nuts and joyously crazy.

 

Los Angeles was very different from New York, and a New Yorker anywhere outside of New York is an alien.

​

If you censor yourself because you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, I could live with that. But when you censor yourself because you don’t want to jeopardize a job or a career, well, there goes the human experience. How are you going to make real friends if you’re faking it?

 

I have always had high energy, and it’s a plus. What I lack in intelligence, I make up for in energy.

 

The more money you make, the less you have. That’s what Marty Bregman told me.

 

I don’t think you ever lose your energy. You just lose your looks.

​

I’m a man who has limited time left, let’s face it. We all sort of do. But my time is a little more limited. It changes the world for you to have that perspective. You cannot know it at 47. You can try to imagine it, but you can’t feel it. And that’s what’s lonely about it.

 

Nobody ever left me anything in my life. There was no such thing as a will. There was no such thing as a bank account, either, where I came from. These things just didn’t exist in my family.

 

Fame and wealth changes everything in your personal life. It requires a certain type of adjustment.

 

Is something meaningful only because you can remember it, or is it meaningful because, in a manner of speaking, you are leaving it? Leaving all the memories you had – leaving everything.

 

Maybe that’s why some people are always taking pictures on their iPhones. Some want to be remembered. It’s called immortality. It’s the handprint on the cave, that imprint: they wanted us to know they were there. As I heard it said at someone else’s memorial, “You don’t have to miss me, just remember me.”

​

​Objectively, I never knew what the fuck I was doing. It’s that simple. I went from one thing to another. I’ll never learn, and that’s my problem. Or my gift. I don’t learn things. I’m the first one to raise my hand high and say, “I don’t know.” Who wants to wallow in the pretense of knowing everything? What knowledge? What do I know, that I can sit with a pipe and expound on? I’m not Socrates.

​

Maybe that’s the reason I wrote this book. I want to go home. These memories keep bringing me back to a place where I enjoyed being. I look back at that life and I think I was so lucky. There was a satisfaction to that life. There was hope in that life.

 

You would think I would be down in the dumps because I’d been fired so much. Or that I might be anxious, worrying about where I would find the next job. But I was always sure that one would come along – the jobs were just something to eat by, and they would keep coming while I pursued my vocation. And New York City gave me so much to support that dream.

​

Work has always been life – something that opens the door and allows the spirit to come out. A world I can visit, where the imagination has switched on and life becomes once again what it was: discovery, delight, ecstasy.

 

For now, we had no awareness that we were poor or that we lacked anything. We had each other; we were on top of the world, as James Cagney said in White Heat. We didn’t think of ourselves as having nothing. It wasn’t even a question in our minds. My friends and I had the whole world, as far as we knew.