-
It depends how lenient you are with your definition of artist. If you're going to include those who tap dance at the high school recital, then maybe I am.
-
When I go see a basketball game, I'm always in the front row. I always have a table at a restaurant; I never have trouble getting a taxi.
-
You thought the stage, you thought Broadway: that was the pot at the end of the rainbow. The idea of being in Hollywood was like going to the Moon or Mars.
-
If it wasn't for the Mark Twain Masquers, I don't know where my life would have gone.
-
I had no idea when I graduated from high school and then from graduate school what I wanted to do with my life. I had no idea that I was ever going to be an actor.
-
Everybody wants to be a movie star. I bet if you ask that guy would he like to be a movie star, he'd say, 'Sure.'
-
If I'm a guy reading a newspaper, and I hear this actor who I know gets great seats at basketball games, and he's complaining about being typecast, I think, 'Hey man, count your blessings.'
-
If you were brought up in the '40s, a kid in Ossining, New York, hanging out at the poolroom and stealing, how can you think, 'Here I am in Ossining. I, too, can be a movie star!'
-
I used to take girls out on a date to Night Court. And I'll tell you, most girls, they got a kick out of going to Night Court. 'Cause you get a lot of laughs... and it's cheap.
-
What wouldn't have happened to me if I hadn't ended up in Hartford, Connecticut.
-
I still get fan mail for Columbo.
-
There isn't an Eskimo who doesn't love 'Columbo.'
-
I did do my own stunts.
-
I didn't become an actor until I was an old man of 28 or 29. I declared to the world that I was an actor. Nobody heard me, but I did declare it.
-
Initially, they wanted Columbo to wear a driving coat. I said: 'Are you kidding? He's not an English aristocrat.'
-
The celebrity craze is a little much. But it's good for me, so you don't bite the hand that feeds you.
-
There's a bit of a problem. The script that I like, the network doesn't like. The script that they like, I don't like.
-
I never turned a part down when they offered me money.
-
I've been asked a few thousand times how much of Columbo is Falk and vice versa.
-
I came to Hollywood and nobody knew me. I was on a coupla TV shows.
-
I watch practically no TV - ah, what the hell do I watch? Oh, I was for a long time addicted to CNN.
-
Sometimes I was in school plays, but only when the kid they'd originally picked got sick and they asked me to substitute.
-
I thought actors were artists and that artists had to be European.
-
If your mind is at work, we're in danger of reproducing another cliche. If we can keep our minds out of it and our thoughts out of it, maybe we'll come up with something original.