Mandy Patinkin
Refugees come to us seeking asylum, seeking freedom, justice and dignity - seeking a chance just to breathe. And people in our country are saying close the doors and don't let them in?Collection: Freedom
I love my work, I love the people I work with, I do the best I can.Collection: Best
I feel like I know so little, and I just hope I get to live so long. I came to puberty late; it's all been late.
The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.
In my prayers every day, which are a combination of Hebrew prayers and Shakespeare and Sondheim lyrics and things people have said to me that I've written down and shoved in my pocket, I also say the name of every person I've ever known who's passed on.
Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.
My sense of religion is Einstein's sense of relativity. I don't believe in God. I believe that energy never dies. So the possibility exists that you might be breathing in some other form of Moses or Buddha or Muhammad or Bobby Kennedy or Roosevelt or Martin Luther King or Jesus.
I'm active in PAX, which is a gun awareness organization. We treat gun safety as a public health issue.
As a young man, I think I was in a bit of the revenge business for too many years of my life.
My inner motivation is to make the world a better place; the bad guy and the good guy think the same thing.
I've been very blessed in my personal life and in my career and I have never been ungrateful for what I have.
Too often, we think that, when we have a problem with our lives or our country, that the way to fix it is to take an eye for an eye. That doesn't help anything or anyone.
I belong on the stage. I love how the day's events, whatever you read in the newspapers or watch on the TV, are reflected in the performance and how it's received.
My whole life, I feel so blessed. I met my wife: I can't get over that I got so lucky. I have two incredible children. I can't believe that I've been so blessed. I've had a career that is way past anything that I've ever dreamed. I get to work in all these different areas with such extraordinary people on every level.
Violence only perpetrates more violence, and it becomes a vicious cycle. There are political situations all over the world where there are untold acts of revenge for incidences, and thousands and thousands of lives are lost because of them.
When I'm on the road with concerts, people ask me to autograph my CDs, but more and more they come up with the cookbooks.
I still have the sword of Inigo Montoya - it's mine!
My dream has come true, now that I have passed it on.
Isaac and I are going to Israel to ride for peace enviromental justice and a safer world for us all.
But I loved the theatre and I was just doing theatre 24/7 and kept dropping courses because I didn't have the time and the chancellor thought that wasn't a good idea after awhile.
I wanted to go to a liberal arts college, I wanted to have that experience.
We did a different show every night. We'd open a show, and then two weeks later we'd open the next show. And two weeks later we'd open the third show until we had all eight running. And it was just one of the richest experiences I'd ever had in my theatrical life.
I'm on the board of directors for Peace Now, which works tirelessly between the Palestinians and the Israelis to create peace in the Middle East and we've never been closer.
I'm a spiritual person, I'm an America, I'm a Jew, and all of those things influence every breath I take, everywhere I go.
Everything I experience influences everything I do.
I try to say something about the human condition whenever I can when I'm lucky.
I try to get that across in the work, to try to, if I'm lucky, to make this world a little bit better for all of us before I check out. And that's if I'm lucky, I don't always get to have that privilege but I try always.
Well, I'm not a critic, I'm just a worker. So, I'm always grateful for anything the critics say - good or bad.
I don't want people to sit and process the song. I want them to just let them bathe over them.
The best work I can do is to take myself as much as I can out of it and get it as simple as I can.
I can achieve that by personally relating the words that I am saying to something I have known in my life.
When you work on a text of a lesser quality, as the interpreter or the delivery person, you are obliged to try to fill it out as you see so many people do in lesser work.
You rarely pay the rent by doing Shakespeare or Ibsen.
I'm just an actor. I am nothing special.
Our actions are the ground we walk on.
I got married because I wanted to do something that was more than I understood, because my feelings were more than I understood.
The great love of my life is music.
Movies were a struggle for me - they didn't come easy.
I have no problem with violence, I have no problem playing horrible people.
If you told me I could only do one thing, I would choose live concerts.
There's something about singing that I just love. It makes me feel freer than anything in the world.
People on both sides of any conflict believe they are right, whether it's on a TV show or in the real world.
I think it's fair to say I'm attracted to playing characters who are rather intense.
I'm an obsessive person. I like intensity.
I'm an obsessive hiker and I do it every day for two hours and it really helps me when it comes to learning songs or scripts.
My mom was a great cook and great baker all her life.
Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater.
I'm Jewish and I can sing and I'm alive.
I desperately want to see the day today and do the best I can not miss a shred of sunlight. It'll be over before I know it.
I'm lyrically driven, I'm not musically driven.