American Quotes

Hitchhiking was such a pure form of existence. You'd wake up in the morning, and you'd have no idea what your day was going to be. And that's something I've never been able to shake. I loved that.

For me and for I'm sure any actor, each role is a different challenge to prepare for in a different way.

Even the small amount of infamy I have makes me uncomfortable - on a personal level and on a professional level.

Certainly I've had the experience of thinking a person was one thing, and finding out they were another.

Being a kid, as all kids do, you feel out of place or like kind of a freak. You wake up feeling like your head got put onto someone else's body that day.

As an actor, you don't often get a chance to know exactly the impact of what the audience is seeing, even though you can ask where the frame is. A move that feels tiny can be huge, and vice versa.

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling, but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life, that you're making a movie.

A lot of times, you just don't get the jobs you want to get.

My fear now is of cliche, of complacency, of not being able to feel authenticity in myself and those around me.

It's nice to sometimes get things out of life, rather than stealing from other artists. I'm trying to steal from the real people.

For the last 20 years of my life, I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects, so I'm attracted to good story, writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change.

When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.

When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.

To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening.

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

Really, I didn't like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.

On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me.

My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano.

My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.

It's hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they're all the same, I'm convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth.

In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old.

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

I was not typical. Whatever typical or normal is, I was somehow separated and different.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.

I remember my mother finding mud somehow and putting it on the sting.

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.

I didn't know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English.

I didn't for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then.