"This movie is the best example of the theme “if you love someone, sometimes you have to let them go.” This guy [Rick], he has fallen in love with this woman, and he can’t get over her. She comes back, and she’s married to this freedom fighter, someone that the Nazis are hunting. If he doesn’t give her these two plane tickets, he gets the girl, because the Nazis will find this guy. If he gives her the tickets, her husband is saved and he’ll never see her again. Boy, what a choice. Love often confronts us with some choices that are the toughest things of all. They include compromise and at times, sacrifice. And to me, Casablanca did that phenomenally well."

"I played Marty because I was Marty. I was the kind of guy that was a wall flower. I didn’t know how to dance. To get a girl — my goodness, that was beyond comprehension for me, because I could see myself being turned down and I wasn’t the kind of person that liked to be turned down, you know? Why bother to ask if you’re going to be turned down? So I never asked. That was it. But time went along and I went into the service, and I grew up. When I saw that script, I said, ‘My God, that’s me.’ I was very happy to do it, because it gave me the opportunity to play something that I could easily play, and I knew that I had in my heart exactly what happened."

"No. 4, I’d go for His Girl Friday. There’s just that Howard Hawks rapid dialogue, the glory of Cary Grant [at his] most Cary Grant-ish. It’s funny. It moves, it actually has huge social responsibility, and they did a thing where they gender-swapped the lead. Hilly, in the play The Front Page and in other films made of The Front Page, is a guy going off to get married and having that be sabotaged by his editor. Howard Hawks’ twisting things, so that Rosalind Russell played Hilly and was the ex-wife of Cary Grant’s, her abusive and appalling editor who was also determined to get a story and have her get the story and have her not leave. There was brilliance in that, and it’s feisty, and it’s funny, and it’s something that I can watch over and over again and never get tired of."