Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My aunt put my cousins into a childrens modelling agency, then my mum did it with us. Me and my sister got a few TV adverts, which was good pocket money. A director saw photos of me and asked me to do a short film.
In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Must we be put to shame by much smaller and poorer countries, by Ireland, France, Austria or Sweden, who have understood that a nation's support of its arts is a matter of both national pride and cultural survival?
How it shaped my perception is this: I have become so indelibly identified as a character in pop culture that it has forced me to go deeply within myself to get a very very rock solid sense, to myself, of who I am.
When you do a movie in the studio system, there's a committee. A committee of six or seven people you answer to. There's two or three producers, a studio executive and one or two people above that studio executive.
I think that if you get too close to the character, if you do too much historical research, you may find yourself defending your view of a character against the author's view, and I think that's terribly dangerous.
Going through a divorce after twenty-five years of marriage was the most difficult time for me. It was challenging to reorient my life from being centered around family, a family home, and a long-term relationship.
'Animal House' was sort of the first real, contemporary, youthful voice of the baby boom generation. It spoke to that audience, and it spoke to that part of me which was saying, 'Out with the old, in with the new.'
I don't really like to just sit down at a computer and write because that tends to be a little forced. Sometimes the funniest ideas just happen in the moment, when you're talking to people, or you notice something.
Some people are cowards... I think by and large a third of people are villains, a third are cowards, and a third are heroes. Now, a villain and a coward can choose to be a hero, but they've got to make that choice.
Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. On the other hand, this not knowing has its charms.
I wanted my dad to be proud of me, and I fell into acting because there wasn't anything else I could do, and in it I found a discipline that I wanted to keep coming back to, that I love and I learn about every day.
And I like people. I like to know what you're really up to. I'm a bit of a nosey busy body. Why do they do the things they do? Why are they prepared to do the things they do to get what they want? When? Where? Who?
I've learned by hanging out in Hollywood, where I disagree politically with most people, that most people's hearts are in the right place, and the only thing we have to argue about is the way to solve the problems.
I'm a big fan of 'National Geographic', the magazine and the channel. Anything to do with the natural world. For years, when I was younger, I was convinced I would be a nature photographer, but that didn't pan out.
The tactic of leading people into... a war that doesn't make any sense by telling them they are under attack, and if they raise any objection they're unpatriotic, is a very old tactic. And it doesn't intimidate me.
As it turns out, my grandmother, my mother, my wife, and my daughter are all women, and I like those people. I'm concerned about the issues that they face in their lives. So I'm a feminist, but that's not all I am.
I got this call that they wanted me to join this cast. They called it a family show, and it thought that it would be similar to all family shows. I wasn't sure about this until I watched some tapes, and was amazed.
We made this really dumb decision to put on the cover nothing from South Park but just a real life photo of a piece of pooh dressed up like Mr. Hankey, and a lot of people didn't, they didn't even know what it was.
I'm good at giving up control to people who know where they're going and what they want to do. I can sit in the back of a car and ride cross-country if you know where you're going and you know how to take me there.
I like the detail work of telling a story in small pieces, as is done in movie-making, and also the long leap of faith needed to see a theatre performance through each night. Both require focus and self-discipline.
When you come onto the set, everything should be focused around your character and you should stay in the pocket, as much as possible. Every actor has their own process. For me, I really need to stay in the pocket.
I grew up the son of an acting teacher, so I was kind of introduced to all of these various methods early... I've never been really good at articulating how, what that process is in the way that Stanislavsky could.
As a younger actor, I had delusions. I would dream of Scorsese and De Niro; I would meet people, and it would be like this, and it would change moviemaking in France, and Paris would become the center of the world.
Well, what do you owe yourself? Do you dare take time out to listen to the grass grow, or can you even afford the expense of getting far enough away from life's daily cacophony to hear it grow if you took the time?
I've never talked to anyone writing a book on me. I've had so much written about me that is made up, usually something that seems silly enough or weird enough to get remarked upon, and it's pretty much all fiction.
I have very high expectations of myself. I'm a very competitive person but competitive with myself. I want to be the best that I can be and if that means that I'm eventually better than everyone else then so be it.
You can't legitimately kick on income tax, for it's on what you have made. You have already made it. But, look at land, farms, homes, stores, vacant lots. You pay year after year on them whether you make it or not.
The Democrats are going to change the name of the Hoover Dam. That is the silliest thing I ever heard of in politics . . . Lord if they feel that way about it, I don't see why they don't just reverse the two words.
I'm so not ready to die. It petrifies me. I go alone. I go to a place I don't know. It might be painful. It might be the end. My thought is that it is the end. I become nameless, and I spent a lifetime being known.
Every piece of entertainment is made with the idea that 'This is going to be terrific' and 'This is the best thing I've ever done' and then it hits the public and then the public tells you whether it's good or bad.
I get random meetings, like, 'Ron Howard would like to sit down with you.' 'Really?' If 'Breaking Bad' hadn't happened, Ron Howard probably wouldn't want to sit down with me. Because he would have no idea who I was.
It takes a lot of time to write and put up a sketch show, but that's part of who I am. I don't think that ever goes away, that sensibility - especially coming from the Upright Citizens Brigade. That's just who I am.
I think people forget that to be on the A list you first had to go through the original graded Parliamentary Selection Board. I did that and then like everyone else had the further interviews to get onto the A list.
What you eat, how much you exercise, what example you set for those you influence are all matters of choice. Consistently making that best choice will add up to living your best life. Your health is the key to that.
I don't know what drives me to succeed. I know I want to always do the best I can.I guess I was maybe in little league baseball as far as I wanted to be good at that. But school, I certainly wasn't the best at that.
When I was a teenager, the actors I was really into were Mickey Rourke and Sean Penn. I saw 'Rumble Fish' on my 16th birthday, and around the same time, it was 'Falcon and the Snowman' and 'Bad Boys' from Sean Penn.
I'm not a city kind of guy. I'm happiest when I'm tromping through the woods. That's why I don't live in Los Angeles. Being physically away from Hollywood probably loses me a few jobs, but the best ones seek me out.
My relationship with science is as someone who's curious and hungry to know, hungry to understand. So all I have to offer is my ignorance and my curiosity, which is a good combination, as long as they come together.
Things have got to add up to 100 points. The script is part of it, the character is part of it, the people I'm working with is the third part of it - and any combination of the three has got to add up to 100 points.
I was horrified when Richard Chamberlain and Rupert Everett said gay actors should stay in the closet. They were saying to people that they should live a lie and not be liberated, to live in fear of being found out.
And introduce an element of cynicism and darkness into it and just realize that we're all vulnerable. We are humans. There is a finite end to this life and we're all going to face it and a little silliness can help.
One week you may be an actor, and the next week you had to be nimble enough to be a TV host. And the week after that, you might have to do some stand-up or be in an improv company or write and sing a song somewhere.
An era that I specifically like is sort of late '50s, early '60s. I guess mid '50s, too. I like these types of films that deal with post-WWII America and this more complex leading man that kind of emerges from that.
I was in public school until third or fourth grade, and after that, I was homeschooled. I was homeschooled until I was 14, and then when I was 14, I began attending college. Mom was not playing about that education.
I don't understand actors who complain when they get work. 'I'm working too much. I've got to get up too early ...' Isn't this the point? There's somebody right now who's bussing tables who would love your problems.
I believe we can balance the scales if Tom Cruise would lower his quote by a mere $29 million... I assure you my salary would not make a difference. My annual salary is the budget for Altoids on one of Tom's movies.
You can tell Gov. Bush to rest assured that I'm not going to leave the country because we have to get him out of office and we have to get his brother out of office in 2004. We're not resting until we get that done.
There are so many factors that go into how you feel, as a performer, on any given movie, that it's really hard to identify which things are the things that help you be good, and which are the things that hinder you.
I see myself as a character actor, and I've always been drawn to playing characters that are different from myself because acting is escapism for me. I've never been that comfortable playing people that are like me.