Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I just started the way most comics start, doing open mic shows around Sacramento and San Francisco, and eventually, I moved to L.A. After about four or five years in L.A., I got the call to join the 'The Daily Show.'
One thing I do personally started 20 years ago. I started meditating, and I know twice a day I can kind of let everything drop. It's just about being quiet, like drawing back the day, and it allows me to have energy.
My father is very Jean Valjean. He's what I would call a great example of a religious person. He is a deeply thoughtful man whose religion is in his deeds way more than anything else. It's not talked about that much.
Physically, I’m not tough. I may think tough. I would say I’m kinda tough and calloused inside. I could use a foot more in height and fifty more pounds and fifteen years off my age and then God help all you bastards.
I grew up with the great Sir Laurence Olivier, and I think it's fair to say that a lot of actors of my age were influenced by his very individual vocal delivery. He was a showman who would always play to the gallery.
Before I ever acted as an amateur - which I did a great deal at school and at university - I used to go to the theater with my parents in the north of England, where I was born and brought up... Theater of all sorts.
It's an interesting but useless bit of information that every single character in 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' wears a wig, and many of them wears a prosthetic - false ears, feet, hands. In my case, nose.
There was such mass appeal for 'Sharknado.' It went over so well - not just here in the United States but globally - that it would be such a missed opportunity and a ripoff for the fans not to bring 'Sharknado' back.
You’re directing a movie, but you are at the head of a ship of people, a whole fleet of people. And being able to manage that - being able to handle yourself as a director being a leader - that’s massively important.
I'm going to write a book, continue acting, continue motivational speaking and just share with people who I am and what I've learned in my second chance of life and pass it on to people in their first chance of life.
I was a Spidey fan as a kid. I always liked the complexity and the teenaged angst that Spider-Man, Peter Parker, always had to deal with. It was kind of a deeper, darker storytelling that just good-guy-beats-bad-guy.
There's a period just before you start a movie when you start thinking, I don't know what in the world I'm going to do. It's free-floating anxiety. In my case, though, this is over by lunch the first day of shooting.
I don't believe that relationships are fixed things. People are necessarily complex and confused beings. We don't always do the right thing, say the right, and behave the same way or the way we always want to behave.
I was always dressing up as a kid in the backyard, building some sort of fort and having battles against imaginary enemies. It's often that same feeling when you're pretending for a living, but it's with bigger toys.
I really love young Tom Hanks. He's just one of my favorites. He's a great, quirky every-man. I also love Zach Braff. I really love actors that are quirky and interesting, that sort of try to portray 'normal' people.
It's one of the most beautiful scripts [Brokeback Mountain] I've ever read, and it was Ang Lee, and at the time Heath [Ledger] was a friend of mine - before we even shot the movie - and always sort of alluring to me.
The one thing you've gotta do is that you need to always do the best you can do, no matter what the given situation, no matter what comes up against you. You do the best you can do, and you never give up. Never quit.
There's a difference between wanting to appear confident and actually feeling confident. I think there have been many times when I've overcompensated for how nervous or out of place I feel. I was like that at school.
There is no way to be truly great in this world. We are impaled on the crook of conditioning. A fish that is in the water has no choice that he is. Genius would have it that we swim in sand. We are fish and we drown.
Almost all the movies I've directed are adaptations. And I think what I found when I went to film school, where they try to push you to find your voice or your thing, is that I got a lot of things out of adaptations.
When it comes to belts and rank, I don't care what belt I am; I don't care what rank I am. I'm proud that I've achieved high ranks through some great instructors around the world, but ultimately, the mat doesn't lie.
In fact my favourite thing is the wig because I'm a very lazy actor so every time I put it on, in order to keep it straight, they kept on telling me to tip my head back because otherwise I was eating it all the time.
The suburbs have this veneer of happiness, you know? This veneer of the ideal life. From afar, it's all together - white picket fence, nice house - but you peel away one little layer, and it all comes crumbling down.
What matters to me is my own estimation, and I'm very tough on myself. I need to be proud of what I've done and I work hard for it. I had a very Christian upbringing... lots of guilt. A good thing, It keeps you sane.
I keep working with fairly inexperienced directors. You know, if you have a good crew, a good cameraman, you know, I know what I'm doing. If the actors know what they're doing, we can all pull together, and it works.
I like to say good dialogue is a million times easier to memorize than bad dialogue - difficult good dialogue, even if it's difficult. Aaron Sorkin dialogue is easier to memorize, even though it's wildly complicated.
Our eyes are not viewers, they're also projectors that are running a second story over the picture that we see in front of us all the time. Fear is writing that script, and the working title is 'I'll never be enough'
We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.
'Skins' had been a brilliant breeding ground for young actors, young directors and young writers. It was a safe environment to experiment; it tried new things, and it was an amazing time and amazing to be part of it.
I blame my work for a lot of things. I thank my work for a lot of things, too, but the trouble with being so passionately involved in work is that it becomes like a lover, like your partner, because it nourishes you.
I think my biggest appeal for fans is probably the fact that I'm honest. I'm up front about who I am. I'm a little naughty. I have a naughty side and everybody knows that. But I know when to use that and when not to.
Most boys' first hero is their father. That was definitely true of my dad. He was a proud Irish American and he taught me a lot about ethics and responsibility. He also introduced me to a lot of wonderful folk music.
I'm struck by how laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.
When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.
They killed me in The Sopranos. I went to David Chase, and I said, "Why me? I'm a detective! You can use me forever!" And he told me, "John, there's a rule in television: Somebody has to die that the audience likes."
You have to learn to cut your cloth accordingly. But it seems to be a human weakness. Once you start making a lot of money, you just join in with everyone else. It's like the banks, and we've seen what happens there.
There's an awful lot of hanging around when you're doing science fiction. Going down and waiting for them to set up, being told to go back to your dressing room while they change the track and the lighting and so on.
I never turn on the crowd. Sometimes, you think it's a terrible show, and then afterward, sometimes people say they really liked it. So turning on the crowd is only going to alienate the few people who might like it.
The last thing on my mind was to be an actor, but I had a crush on a cute girl in the drama department, so the best thing for me to do was audition, help out, do carpentry, whatever it took to get me on that project.
I'd never even sung in the shower, I'm too mortified. But once I got over the initial fear it was kind of enjoyable. Sondheim's melodies and lyrics are a real pleasure to tromp around in, it's really beautiful stuff.
'Johnny' was a coping mechanism who could take those things which could have ordinarily destroyed me, by tweaking my past and throwing it back out there, getting laughs from things that would have otherwise upset me.
I'll always be an actor first. I grew up doing musical theater, so music and acting, to me, have always gone hand in hand. I'm going to be an actor first because it's my career, but music will always be a part of me.
'Climb Every Mountain' is a beautiful statement of philosophy. Critics may think 'The Sound of Music' is saccharine, but I think it's profound. The message, that we can't accommodate evil, is just as important today.
I think acting is a gift. I look at someone like Ben Kingsley, and he's incredibly charismatic, even when he's not acting. He's an incredibly hard worker, and he has a very specific system that he does with his work.
I didn't do plays at school, because I didn't have the confidence. At 14, I was at boarding school in Devon and I suffered from dyslexia quite badly, but they had a very good department there which specialised in it.
'Vegas' was something very close to me. I had such a blast doing that. I'm still a little upset that we never really got to shoot that final episode. So many people were invested in it. I'll always be sad about that.
It's actually very freeing to be given permission as an artist to let that ride and to really let it ride, to actually experience it and bring it out of you. It's been uncomfortable and it's freeing at the same time.
I need to gain a lot more experience. I think so much of being a director, other than the technical aspect and the artistry of it, is the confidence that you are, I think in many ways, you're the captain of the ship.
When I go to movies and I love the movie, it's because it feels like it articulated something about how we're living now, and also gives me some insight into my own life. I feel actually altered after having seen it.
I did theatre a lot when I was a kid. Then I went to acting school in New York. I did a lot of behind the scenes in college. I wanted to learn while I had the time. I studied theatre and film in different capacities.