In the hands of good writers, you have the opportunity to present both sides of an opinion equally and that you leave it to the audience to listen and then make up their own minds.
— Mandy Patinkin
The great fun for me is these collaborators. I'm nothing by myself. Being with these people, whether it's the 'Homeland' cast or stage collaborators, they make you everything you are. They make you come to work. They make you be alive.
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.
The songs I love to sing are story songs, from Yiddish songs to Tom Waits.
If you're sick, watch funny movies.
One of the greatest gifts that 'Homeland' has given me is it's affirming on a daily basis.
If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself and wipe myself off the face of the earth.
I'm lyrically driven, I'm not musically driven.
Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater.
I'm an obsessive person. I like intensity.
There's something about singing that I just love. It makes me feel freer than anything in the world.
Movies were a struggle for me - they didn't come easy.
I got married because I wanted to do something that was more than I understood, because my feelings were more than I understood.
I'm just an actor. I am nothing special.
I can achieve that by personally relating the words that I am saying to something I have known in my life.
Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.
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'm not frightened about terrorism. I'm frightened about the roots of what we call terrorism.
If a movie musical came along and the part was right and somebody wanted me to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat.
It's what Shakespeare's mission was - to illuminate our thoughts and struggles and bring about the possibility of getting the most we can out of a day as opposed to least in this brief moment we're here.
I still have the sword of Inigo Montoya - it's mine!
My inner motivation is to make the world a better place; the bad guy and the good guy think the same thing.
During 'Chicago Hope,' I never let directors talk to me, because I was so spoiled. I started off with people like Milos Forman, Sidney Lumet, James Lapine, unbelievably gifted people. So there I was, saying, 'Don't talk to me, I don't want your opinion.' I behaved abominably.
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.
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.
My mom was a great cook and great baker all her life.
I think it's fair to say I'm attracted to playing characters who are rather intense.
If you told me I could only do one thing, I would choose live concerts.
The great love of my life is music.
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.
You rarely pay the rent by doing Shakespeare or Ibsen.
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've been very blessed in my personal life and in my career and I have never been ungrateful for what I have.
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.
My wife will tell you that if you feel my hands before I walk on for a performance, you could chill a bottle of wine.
I have never been asked to be in a movie musical. Other than 'Yentl,' which I didn't sing in.
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.
I don't know what's going to happen in life, so I don't think it's fair that I know what's going to happen in 'Homeland.'
The biggest public mistake I ever made was that I chose to do 'Criminal Minds' in the first place.
I have the strength from my mother, the survivability. I have wonderful qualities from my mother - but please, Mother, forgive me - I heard judgment constantly about my father.
So I'm truly an actor who sings, and not a singer who acts.
I'm Jewish and I can sing and I'm alive.
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.
People on both sides of any conflict believe they are right, whether it's on a TV show or in the real world.
I have no problem with violence, I have no problem playing horrible people.
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.
Our actions are the ground we walk on.
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.
I don't want people to sit and process the song. I want them to just let them bathe over them.
I love my work, I love the people I work with, I do the best I can.
