"Family Affair, to spend time with his family in Hawaii, before casting as Hardcastle: "I get tired of sitting home and doin' nothing. If I'm doing something eight months of the year, I don't mind loafing the other four. But, lately, I've been finding fewer and fewer movies I'd like to do. And when that happens, I get hard to live with. Then this thing came along. I read it. I liked it. This character Hardcastle: I figured I could live with him for five years if I had to. There was something going on there. You don't get a helluva lot of character in series TV. They're more likely to star the car."

“If I live to be a hundred--and I hope I do--I won't have time to read all the books I want to read, or talk to the people I want to know. Not party talk. That's a waste of time. Real talk.”

“What for? I don't go to the Daisy or any of that. We don't give parties under a striped awning out over the lawn for two hundred people, four of whom we like.”

“In other words...you can't be a misogynist and expect women to appreciate you.”

“I've made I don't know how many pictures. Forty, I guess. I've seen only about a half dozen of them. We made Reflections in a Golden Eye in Rome last spring. I really enjoyed working with Liz and Brando and that great director, John Huston. But the kind of picture I enjoy seeing is something like The Parent Trap. That was a charming thing with Hayley Mills playing my twin daughters. I saw that four times. I even took my wife's parents to see it. I like it so much I forgot I was in it, as a matter of fact.”

“I don't pay any attention. The stunt people take care of all that. All I do is get in and out of the Coyote , which is no mean trick. You can't get into the S.O.B. without bending yourself into a pretzel. Me, I'd rather drive a pickup.”

“The only attraction is the time. I work just 70 days a year on the show. I can still make two, three movies a year if I want to... If it were Bonanza , walking around the Ponderosa, tied up nearly all year, no-o-o chance. That's a fate worse than death.”