Dennis Farina

“I have - and you gotta believe this - hardly ever met anybody in Hollywood who's not nice. There are some people I don't like, but everybody has been very nice.”

“I have a home in Arizona. I go a couple months a year, but basically Chicago is my home.”

“My friends are still the guys I met 40 or 50 years ago.”

“When I was younger, I watched all the detective shows.”

“I never jumped into anything, and I never liked being cajoled into anything. I've pretty much always done things because I wanted to do them.”

“When I first started out acting, I didn't have anything to lose. I had another career. If I fell on my face, I could say, 'I'll see ya,' and go back to working.”

“I try to bring my own style to a role, but I can't change how people think of me.”

“You can't act for the editing. You just go in and do the scene the way you think is right.”

“If you did something, and it wasn't right, you definitely found out about it. And they were pretty smart people, both my parents, so you didn't get too much by them.”

“I'm a bit of a clotheshorse, and having a tailor-made suit is a big deal.”

“I read the script and try not to bring anything personal into it. I make notes, talk to the director and we decide what kinds of shades should be in the character.”

“I'm set in my own ways. I like to do the things I want to do when I want to do them.”

“I don't know if I have a technique. I'm just trying to remember the words.”

“You really have to act on the force, too. You're involved in a hundred things a day, and you have to react in a hundred different ways, depending on what's going on. And you learn that as you go through your career, how you handle certain situations, interrogations, how you carry yourself. There's a kind of acting to it.”

“You can change a person's life in an instant; put him in a movie, and you start thinking differently, you want to be in another movie. It's like an addiction almost.”

“I learned a long time ago: You're in the entertainment business. You're not in the reality business. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.”

“This generation of filmmakers is very good. They're seasoned, for some reason.”

“I love England and the historical aspect of it.”

“I don't need to see the old school to remember it and the teachers there. They changed the way that I've always looked at life and learning.”

“One of the funny things in life to me is a guy who takes himself very seriously.”