Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The feeling of New Orleans is so pervasive. It's such a strange and decadent and enchanted embrace that that city has. There's a dark magic present. It's no wonder that it's been the hot bed for so much vampiric folklore. The city has got an ancient quality. It's one of the oldest cities in North America.
The only way we are going to get diversity is if the demographics of the decision-makers change... The odd-token bone thrown is not going to do it. Don't pat yourself on the back because you made that black drama; that's not diversity. It's got to be baked into the foundation of where the ideas flow from.
We all have one, in one form or another. To me, this dragon is both the wild nature of ourselves and our conscience in his embodiment of the Old Code ethical behavior and morality. At the same time, he's our unconscious, the place from which our dreams arise. I just spoke my lines to the dragon within me.
It took me a long time to make that leap to being a grown-up and responsible adult because I carried on being a child actor into my late twenties. It's OK to be precocious when you're young, but when you're a man of about 27 or 28 and playing a 17-year-old in a TV show, it kind of prolongs your childhood.
When I was a kid, I had ambitions for being a television announcer, which was before television took off, you know, in the late '40s. And just through necessity, going out looking for work, I was starting to sing, and dance, and act, and I never expected to do that, nor to have any success at it at least.
God bless him, I mean a lot of times you get non-actors on a set and they get really self-conscious, especially when doing something crazy like singing along with Phil Collins. They get sort of reserved and self-conscious. Mike [Tyson] completely trusted Todd [Phillips] and totally put everything into it.
I love the variety of films. In theater, you go into a room and the director runs the room, so you all work to his or her method. On film, if an actor or an actress is in for a day or two, the director has to get out of that actor what they need, so they have to change and adapt to that actor's technique.
Oh my God... I worked with George C. Scott, way before 'Chips,' in 'The New Centurion.' I co-star in that movie. It was great working with him. I worked with Charlton Heston, Glenn Ford, Robert Mitchum. Stacy Each. The old Hollywood. I met John Wayne, and that was a thrill. I was working next door to him.
I would love to go back to any time in European history, especially in Irish history, to the second or third century, prior to the arrival of Christianity when Paganism flourished. I can always go back there in my imagination, of course. It doesn't cost anything, and it's a form of time travel, I suppose.
Being an actor is a good way to earn a living. And to meet fabulous people. It's great to live very comfortably. I've been lucky, I've had a lot of fun with great roles, but it is true that if I were extremely rich, I would stop and I would go to play football on a beach in the Caribbean with my children.
We only live once, and how would you want to be remembered? I have kids. I have, due to my job, a probably higher responsibility to do good things in my life. But also, since I was a kid, I love doing things out of context, helping friends, being different, being a special kind of man is important for me.
Life has all of these contradictory feelings and contradictory results. People spend their whole lives struggling to get what they think they want, and even if they get it, they find that it's either not what they wanted, or it comes with so many unwanted consequences. We're always shut off from pure joy.
I just think everyone knows you go on those [political satire] shows if you're a politician to, "humanize yourself" - to show, "Hey, I can take a joke." Well, why should satire be in the service of humanizing these people who are supposed to be the target of our venom and vitriol? I think that's unseemly.
I have a lot of faith in President Obama. The thing that seems to be true of him is that he doesn't speak when you would expect him to speak. He's very measured in his response to things. He likes to get all the facts first before he shoots his mouth off. It makes me crazy; it makes a lot of people crazy.
When anything is blocking my head or there's worry in my life, I just go sit on Mars or something and look back here at Earth. All you can see is this tiny speck. You don't see the fear. You don't see the pain. You don't see thought. It's just one solid speck. Then nothing really matters. It just doesn't.
The demographic of our audience is young. It also contains a high proportion of black, Jewish and gay people, who have all been encouraged by society to think of themselves as oddities or mutants. I hope that's why X-Men chimes with them - it's certainly why I was attracted to the idea in the first place.
The sanctuary would be the epicenter for the foundation. We'll have think tanks there. It's going to be a really, really amazing place. As an educational home base, we will also focus on the development of sustainable agriculture initiative. It's a huge project but one I am exceptionally passionate about.
To be a true comic, you have to have a signature move. You ever watch wrestling? And your favorite wrestler has the one move that he always does to finish his opponent off, right? Like when he climbs on the rope, and he always jumps off the top rope and finishes off his opponent - that's what a comic has.
When I first started doing comedy years ago, I used to be the biggest Michael Richards fan. I used to love this dude. He was on a TV show called 'Fridays,' and man, he was tall and lanky - and I was tall and lanky. I love physical comedy, and he was a physical comedian, and I said, 'Man, I love this guy.'
One of the things I have been arguing about - and slowly they maybe coming around - is tjat I personally don't believe in aliens. But, I do believe that there is something out there that is accountable for all these mysterious things that are going on: I think it is a spiritual thing not a material thing.
I did about 10-12 national commercials and then got one line parts in things like 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' and the show 'The Unit.' Got a little part in the movie 'Redbelt' by David Mamet and kept slowly grinding up and then started getting bigger parts in independents and getting noticed by Liz Meriwether.
Being able to do lead roles in pictures or onstage or whatever it is that you're doing in acting is obviously what you strive for because you want to better yourself as an actor and you want to better yourself as a person as well. But that does come with a lot of responsibility and a great deal of weight.
That straight man character is a short trip between comedy and drama in a project, so I can play the comedic beat on the same page as a dramatic beat. It gives me a lot of freedom as an actor to play scenes in multiple ways because I don't play the clown, nor do I play someone who is particularly maudlin.
The future is now! Soon every American home will integrate their television, phone and computer. You'll be able to visit the Louvre on one channel, or watch female wrestling on another. You can do your shopping at home, or play Mortal Kombat with a friend from Vietnam. There's no end to the possibilities!
I didn't have an imaginary childhood friend, but I did one day imagine somehow tiny green men, and they were only tiny and green because my brother had a ton of toy soldier toys that came on a skateboard plank type of thing, and I just envisioned in this car driving to church with my mom, they were there.
It's an old-fashioned, very outdated, non-functioning idea that we can drain all the resources from directly around us and skyrocket to the top of a skyscraper, and that's success. We have to understand that when one has to leech from others to that degree, then that's something we need to watch and stop.
I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.
For me, it's always more difficult and slightly exposing to play something that's close to yourself. I always like to try to hide, just because I can't stand the way I look. But, I think it's important to change every time and come up with something that's as interesting as it can be, for your characters.
They said, "You get $2 million to make the film, if you're not in it. If you are in it, you get $5 million to make the film." There was no way to make the thing for $2 million, so I made it for $5 million. And then, it turned out there was no way to make the thing for $5 million. That's when it got weird.
A lot of people, most people who are working, they do it for money. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. It so happens that I made a lot of money already, so I don't have to worry that much about it. I wouldn't fault anybody for doing it for the money, but it doesn't interest me right now.
I had this chronic hyperactivity and an inability to focus, so I was forever being moved to another class, with a much smaller group of children - some of them about 18. If I was asked to read a paragraph, this white wall would go up in my head. Still now, I read very slowly and can rarely work out a tip.
If we're talking about the science fiction or action genres, I've always tried when I could to do them in a way that's not just cookie-cutter - that they bring something fresh or original to it, have some kind of ideas to it. I've been fortunate, in some sense, to do those kinds of movies that are unique.
I think of being an actor as kind of a young man's gig. It's emasculating, in a way, people messing with you and putting make-up on you and telling you when to wake up and when to go to sleep, holding your hand to cross the street. I can do it up to a certain point, and then I start to feel like a puppet.
As a producer, as a CEO of Hartbeat Productions, I am making deals to put my company in place to win, to put my staff to work so that while all this stuff is going on, they're in the kitchen cooking. So it's understanding the longevity of the entertainment business; you get out of it what you put into it.
I think about myself as like an ocean liner that's been going full speed for a long distance, and the captain pulls the throttle back all the way to 'stop', but the ship doesn't stop immediately. It has its own momentum and it keeps on going, and I'm very flattered that people are still finding me useful.
I think every role you take on, you should take on the responsibility of doing the best representation of that person or that character or that role. When it is a human being that has actually existed, and it is a person that people know of, yeah, you feel an even more amount of pressure to do a good job.
I was a late bloomer, but I had a career as a contemporary dancer before that, so I had some kind of connection to this world. But I was always a little more in love with the drama of dancing than the aesthetics, so I thought, 'Why don't you give it a chance if you think you can do it a little different?'
I started traveling by myself as early as 5 to see my dad. I'd go to Toronto or Los Angeles, depending on what show he was doing, but most often New York, and we would hang out, and he'd take me to museums and Broadway plays. The ones that had the biggest impact on me were the George C. Wolfe productions.
I was forced to lie to my father by doctors and relatives. I made that choice and agreed with them, and I will never, ever get over it. If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself, and wipe myself off the face of the earth.
There are many interactions that an actor like me has in public when he gets recognized. The best are 'You're a great actor, good work,' and move on. A very good interaction could be when they say 'You were awesome on 'The West Wing,' 'Loved 'In Her Shoes,' great movie,' 'What Women Want,' good job dude.'
We only gain collectively by acting now. We gain by one day not having to pay a thing for fuel. We gain by having cleaner air, water, and food so that we are healthier and our health care costs come down. We gain by deflating the global fossil fuel markets that drive much of the conflict around the world.
If you just do a Google search and type in 'smoking' or 'lung cancer', you will be barraged with never ending facts and numbers, like how one in every three Americans is affected by lung disease and how COPD is the third leading cause of death and if you get lung cancer the odds are 95% that you will die.
That's one of the things about comedy that annoys me the most from a comedian perspective. Comedy has gotten so segregated. Now it's like if you don't agree with somebody, you probably aren't going to like their jokes. I think comedians are starting to write for their audience and not towards the country.
I really wanted to work with Luc Besson. I'm a big fan of his. Did you ever see 'The Professional.' It was very violent. But a fabulous story, a fabulous movie, very well done. So that and two or three other projects of his that I've seen, I just thought if I had a shot to work with him I wanted to do it.
I didn't have any terrible survival jobs. The main job I had before I was able to transition over to acting full-time was working at an after-school program at a middle school teaching improv and standup. So even when I had a regular job, I was still lucky enough to be doing the stuff I loved in some way.
As a child, these colourful superheroes that could fly, or were horrifying like Ghost Rider and the Hulk, with this tremendous rage or these supernatural powers, provided an escape for me from my mundane existence, from my lack of friends or my inability to communicate well with people. They liberated me.
I did a film called 'Floating' early on that had a scene which was similar to a real-life situation I was in at the time. It involved me having a conversation with my father, who was dying. It was close to home and it made me realise acting wasn't just making faces for the cameras, it was a real art form.
I decided to try things, and I started to do things that would take me out of my comfort zone, and a lot of the times, that will cause you to either sink or swim. Really, I just lean on my inner circle and my faith to try to continue to encourage me so that I'm never out. I can be down, but I'm never out.
I think we're a kind of desperation. We're sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we're doing is trying to brighten up the place. That's why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers - because males have got to try and justify their existence.
I always hated high-school shows and high-school movies, because they were always about the cool kids. It was always about dating and sex, and all the popular kids, and the good-looking kids. And the nerds were super-nerdy cartoons, with tape on their glasses. I never saw 'my people' portrayed accurately.