Actor Quotes

I think I'm more bonded, emotionally and in a craft sense, to films that tell extraordinary stories about extraordinary destinies.

I honestly have no strategy whatsoever. I'm waiting for that script to pop through the letterbox and completely surprise me.

I have never felt bereft of anything.

I have a rather naive approach, I think, to my job.

I don't honestly think people know what acting is.

I do remember, as a child, that I always imagined, when I was maybe 6 or 7, my fantasy was that everywhere I went I was being followed by an invisible film crew.

Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn't going to work.

Hamlet is an astonishing intelligence.

Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn't there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can't.

Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It's harder.

But filming is good for you, because the crew isn't allowed to laugh. You can't get addicted to getting the laugh.

But comedy I'd love to do as much as humanly possible.

As an actor there's no autonomy, unless you're prepared to risk the possibility of starving.

As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I'd still be alive by now.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

I'm very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour.

I always try to find something I admire about every character I play.

If your best friend has stolen your girlfriend, it does become life and death.

I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable.

One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer.

People will judge you according to your own convictions.

Life too is precious to waste - to spend on anything but the best.

I was a little bit chubby when I was a kid.

When you're starting out as an actor, you keep raising the stakes. First, you just want to be a character who comes on stage and gets a laugh or two and exits. Just five minutes on a stage, not even Broadway. But every time you say your little prayer at night, you place more demands.

It's funny because all through the '80s I didn't do TV and movies very much. I prided myself that I was making a living in the theater.

I've always been slightly self-conscious as an actor, and I guess that sometimes reads as pomposity. Starting when I was 30, I somehow gave off an impression at an audition that had them mentally put me in a three-piece suit or put an attache case in my hand. If there was a stiff-guy part, the direc

I didn't want to break with my family. I wasn't about to make waves. But I had this feeling I wanted to do something that I liked to do. Acting's what I liked to do most. There must have been a moment when I felt, 'Oh, my God, I like this and what am I going to do about it?'

I come from a wonderful family. My mother was a pianist and my father was a salesman. They were very middle-class, very middle-Western.

I came out of school just at the time regional theater was first expanding. All of a sudden, lots of new companies needed actors.

Frankly, to be honest, I hadn't worked for two years before 'Murphy Brown.' It's a nice illusion now to think of all of us as terribly successful and talented people at the top of our profession, but that's hindsight. I had to pray for a job like this.