Caine: "I am a great admirer of other actors, but I never compete with other actors. I always compete with what I did last, and I'm my own most vicious critic. So I'm always trying to do it better."

Caine: "To disappear your complete self into a character is quite difficult. I've tried it 85 times, and I've succeeded two or three times."

Caine: "Let me put it this way: If you're sitting in a movie and you're watching me, and you say, 'Isn't that Michael Caine a wonderful actor?' then I've failed."

Caine: "When you reach the top, that's when the climb begins."

Caine: "If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you're talking to."

Caine: "Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath."

Caine: "What a lot of people don't realize about gangs, in my opinion, is that a gang is not there to attack you. Eighty percent of the people in a gang are there to stop anyone from attacking them. You join a gang for protection, not to go out and hit someone."

Caine: "I wouldn't make an anti-American film. I'm one of the most pro-American foreigners I know. I love America and Americans."

Caine: "My view of actors is that basically they're all harmless lunatics who'd be on the psychiatrist's couch, except that we get this sort of catharsis every six months or so, and we go and be absolutely someone else."

Caine: "I'm a frustrated stand-up comic. If you hand me a microphone and I get one laugh, then I'll go on for 20 minutes."

Caine: "People say I've 'retained' my Cockney accent. I can do any accent, but I wanted other working-class boys to know that they could become actors."

Caine: "January is the garbage can of movies in America, directly after all the Oscar contenders have been out."

Caine: "I'm trying to work only with established, respected directors. I took a lot of bad scripts and worked for a lot of lazy directors, and it was discouraging to go to the screenings and see that the director had added nothing, the editor had added nothing, there was nothing to see."

Caine: "For all my education, accomplishments, and so called 'wisdom'... I can't fathom my own heart."

Caine: "Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he's that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it's not, I assure you."

Caine: "Things are not quite what they seem always. Don't start me on class, otherwise you'll get a four-hour lecture."

Caine: "I think what is British about me is my feelings and awareness of others and their situations. English people are always known to be well mannered and cold but we are not cold - we don't interfere in your situation. If we are heartbroken, we don't scream in your face with tears - we go home and cry on our own."

Caine: "Save your money. You're going to need twice as much money in your old age as you think."

Caine: "I started with the firm conviction that when I came to the end, I wanted to be regretting the things that I had done, not the things I hadn't."

Caine: "Obsession is a young man's game, and my only excuse is that I never grew old."

Caine: "The difference between a movie star and a movie actor is this - a movie star will say, 'How can I change the script to suit me?' and a movie actor will say. 'How can I change me to suit the script?'"

Caine: "I'll always be there because I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point."

Caine: "The greatest luxury is not driving. I didn't own a car until I was 30, and that was a Rolls-Royce, so it was cheaper to insure a chauffeur. I never want to drive again. My mind is always on other things. I hate parking, and I'm very short-tempered and would get road rage, I'm sure."

Caine: "A lot of my best parts I've been the second choice for, so you never get too egotistical about anything."

Caine: "I feel like 35. At 35 you're old enough to know something and young enough to look forward to what you can do with the knowledge. So I stayed at 35!"