“He [John Cassavetes] was such a genius, such a creative guy. But he was so real, and he had time for everybody. He also put up most of the money for a TV pilot I did, Tweet’s Ladies of Pasadena. The character Tweet Twig looked like a canary who was run over by a lawnmower – shredded Tweet, a village-idiot guy who always gums up everything. Every episode was going to show Tweet on a new job because he got fired from the last one. The little old ladies were the kind who knit and garden. Everybody loved the combination except the network people who could help me, and they just walked out. I shot thousands and thousands of feet of film, and I spent all of Cassavetes’s money, all of my own money. I kept working on it up until about 1981 or ’82, and it was like life, you know. We slip, we bleed. Cassavetes taught me that. The truth is, I never really cared about conventional success. I was probably fired more than any other actor in Hollywood.”

– “Cracked Actor,” Film Comment Jan/Feb 2004; interview conducted in 1992 by Grover Lewis