Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The most important element of breaking into a house is a flashlight, a flashlight will keep ya' on target. You don't wanna be stummblin' around, and it will make it a lot crista-crystal-cleaner and crystal like surranwrap you... I'll never tell you a lie 'cause we're gonna get you through this successfully and you wanna have all the stuff were givin' ya now.
In my personal life I'm very conservative. I've been married to the same person for nearly 50 years, I'm scrupulous about paying bills, avoiding debt. I'm very careful. But as an actor I'm pretty reckless. I've done a lot of things that, when I see myself on screen, I have to shut my eyes. And I've made a whole bunch of movies that nobody sees, including me.
I gravitate towards anything that feels challenging to me, that feels like it's gonna be saying something a bit different and new to the audience, and anything that moves me. I do movies that I would want to see, so I don't necessarily gravitate towards any genre in particular. I just try and do the best work I can and also try to keep the audience guessing.
There probably is a lot of music that no one's ever gonna hear. For anyone doing music, just do exactly what it is that makes you want to do it. If you like listening to odd, strange, bizarre noise and that makes you want to create it, do it. Even if everyone around you tells you it's crap or thinks it won't work, someone out there is going to appreciate it.
Have this Chet Baker movie coming out and in that situation, I went down the rabbit hole studying Chet Baker and being obsessed with the period and the music and the relationships and the dynamic, and everything, drug addiction. There was so much I wanted to get at to kind of get at the truth. With Regression, I was certainly in Alejandro's [Amenabar] hands.
One mustn't allow acting to be like stoc kbroker - you must not take it just as a means of earning a living, to go down every day to do a job of work. The big thing is to combine punctuality, efficiency, good nature, obedience, intelligence, and concentration with an unawareness of what is going to happen next, thus keeping yourself available for excitement.
Domestic violence is often ignored as it usually happens behind closed doors and it can seem easier not to get involved. Yet, domestic violence continues to affect 1 in 4 women at some point in their lifetime, regardless of their background, career, race or age, and it is vital that we do something now to protect those directly affected by abuse in the home.
It was the last generation of writers [ the Cheers] that had grown up reading books instead of watching TV. So you weren't getting anything that was derivative of I Love Lucy or Happy Days. You were getting real characters [like those] they read in P.G. Wodehouse or Dickens or somewhere along the line, because they had all grown up with a love of literature.
Today's a great time to be any creative type of person, I think, and in just about every aspect of creativity, this generation is going to blow away every generation ever. Because we're the first ones with the Internet. I can get together with some friends, shoot a movie, cut it on my laptop at home, and then put it online. We don't have to listen to anyone.
Renewable energy fits well into the conservative mindset by allowing competition into the energy markets so that consumers have choice. The system as it is, with big utilities monopolizing the energy playing field or fossil fuel energy being given massive subsidies so that they are on a kind of corporate welfare, is the antithesis of conservative principles.
I've always been a big fan of the Yeti, simply because I have an affiliation to Everest - who was the New Zealander, Sir Edmund Hillary, the guy that conquered it. He actually went on an expedition after the Everest climb to look for the Yeti, and they didn't find it, but they found a footprint and some hair samples that turned out to be a goat or something.
I'd bought a lot of really challenging, cutting-edge Joel-Peter Witkin photographs very early on. There were severed heads and amputated feet and hands in them - gruesome stuff. I had them all around the house, and if someone couldn't relate to it in some artistic way and instead just said "Yuck," then there probably wouldn't have been anywhere for us to go.
They [Barnes Theatre Club] were a very good group, and for some reason when I finished the backstage thing, I just decided to that I should try to act. So I auditioned for Guys and Dolls and got a little tiny part as some Cuban dancer or something and then in the next play I got the lead part, and then I got my agent. So I owe everything to that little club.
The other, the other aspect when I say I'm an actor is that as an actor you make this imaginative leap into being somebody else, that's to say the muscle of the imagination is as important as any other of the muscles in your body, and so it is something about this instinct in space and time which for me I associate with being an actor rather than a director.
The action stuff takes a long time but when you're there and you're doing it and you go into that take and you run and everything is blowing up around you and you're diving onto something it's actually incredibly thrilling and you feel like a kid again. Like a kid, who used to play and pretend all those things would happen and now they're actually happening.
I am not a politician going around bragging about family values or putting myself on some ridiculous virtuous pedestal. I write comedy. And I am an actor. I am not going to solve the nation's problems. I don't actually spend my life in the way the tabloids like to think I do. I actually spend 95 percent of it writing comedy. Sober. Well, nearly sober anyway.
One of my personal favorites [potential guests] would be Darren Criss from GLEE. I think that guy is so talented, and he’s fast. I think that’s the thing — we don’t have people just because this guy is a star on blah, blah, blah show; you want someone that has personality and can put two sentences together and that doesn’t take themselves quite so seriously.
The common man or women, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian, Protestant or Catholic or Iraqi or American, the common man just wants to live in peace and justice in a clean environment. When we look around the world and we see that is not the case, we know the will of the majority is not being listened to, that's the first sign that our system is broken.
It [Moonlight movie] deals with drug addiction, drug dealing, and single parenthood, but they are three dimensional characters. You understand where they are from and what they are trying to do with their lives. It is not a stereotype that has been pasted onto somebody. These are stories that come from Barry's [ Jenkins] and Tarell's [Alvin McCraney] mothers.
If you take guns away from legal gun owners then the only people who would have guns would be the bad guys. Even a pacifist would get violent if someone were trying to kill him or her. You would fight for your life, whatever your beliefs. You'd use a rock or tear one of these chairs out of the floor. Hey, maybe I've been watching too many Bruce Willis movies!
I suppose I tend to like slightly darker things - people have levelled that on me before and I accept that because in my opinion, if I mention the best movies or the best books, there's always something that's involving slightly darker element of out psyche. I like seeing people under pressure. I like seeing what happens to people when they're under pressure.
The main difference between the art of the actor and all other arts is that every other [non-performing] artist may create whenever he is in the mood of inspiration. But the artist of the stage must be the master of his own inspiration, and must know how to call it forth at the hour announced on the posters of the theatre. This is the chief secret of our art.
... I'm sort of a nervous person with the camera, so I will just shoot arbitrarily until I can focus and compose something, and then I make a shot. So generally, in [the] proof sheets, there are only three or four really concentrated efforts to take a photograph. It's not like a professional kind of person who sets it up so every photograph looks really cool.
I was so disappointed [with movie Forsaken], but maybe I hadn't talked enough with the director. I don't know. But, Kiefer worked it out. Kiefer took it and re-edited it. I don't know whether he talks about that. He's probably more discreet than I am because Jon is a friend of his. Now, it fulfills what I was hoping for, and what we were working on and doing.
The most important part of my practice as an artist has been remembering to stay humble. There is so much hurt, so much sorrow, so much pain in the world, and I think when you're born and bred into privilege, it's easier to have a closed perspective on things. But there's this opportunity that's open to all of us to let empathy connect us back to one another.
I don't come on to seduce the audience. I don't care if everyone laughs. I can't think about that anymore. If there's anything that a lot of experience on stage and a lot of stage time gives you is the confidence to know that it's ok if they're not laughing every second you're up there. Although that's what drives me and I still go too fast a lot of the time.
I couldn't help but be struck that this guy I had thought was the embodiment of everything wrong with American politics, a lot of his domestic policy was mind-numbingly, head-spinningly to the left of Obama's. It was under Nixon that the EPA was created. It was under Nixon that OSHA was created. Under Nixon that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed.
I grew up in a household where the FryDaddy was always bubbling, and butter and salt were never in short supply. I've never been one to choose the healthy option over the non-healthy option if the healthy option was lacking in taste. I believe a little bad is good for you from time to time. When it comes to maintaining a healthy soul, nothing beats traveling.
Because of my comedic-influence growing up, Mel Brooks, Jim Carrey, Steve Martin… A lot of Jeff comedic-influences included Charlie Chaplin and physical comedians of the silent-era. What we were able to do together is to show all these major influences but make it into our own comedy. We've seen the stereotypical boy-meets-girl story a hundred thousand times…
I'm at a period in my life when I'm figuring out my idea of who I am and what I want and how to hold onto love -- all that big stuff. And I'm starting to realize that it can happen at any age. I know people who are in their 50s who are figuring out what they want and who they are, and I think it's great. It's like you're always approaching life as a beginner.
I don't want to be lofty when I say this, but I don't know what a success is any more. I know how we define it, but that was a moment where I went, "Wait, who am I?" You could feel the business, in particular, kind of go "He's all right, let's go over here." I started to go, "Wait, I know why I love to do this." I think I got off track in why I love to do it.
I get off on the interaction with people, and I love the chess of a movie and particularly - not only in preproduction or in production or postproduction - the behavioral chess. That is, learning and being humbled by and also teaching certain people certain things. I love that. As a producer, you have an opportunity to see the whole and bring people together.
There is a person that says they invented the podcast and they are suing Adam Carolla, because he is the top of the hill, for patent infringement. If this person wins, Adam Carolla, Marc Maron, Joe Rogan, Jay Mohr, Chris Hardwick, it will all go away. So, it's kind of like when someone takes your name so you can't get it on Twitter, magnified times a billion.
I love to have the people watching [The Office ] just because it's fun to have people watching, but our fans are so dedicated, so smart and so cool for the most part. We don't have these fans that overwhelm you if they see you on the street. They're like, 'Love the show', or 'What an idiot. You should have said something to her last week.' I'm like, 'I know.'
You can say something that can really help and actor and you can say something that can really get in the way of an actor's performance, kind of cut them off from their instincts and really get into their heads. And every actor's different. Every actor requires something different. Being an actor, for me, was the greatest training to be a writer and director.
I just always liked the company. The people who hung around her were amazing storytellers, whether it was actors or crew. They were just exciting people. And I knew that they were different when I would go see a friend or stay at someone else's house. It just wasn't as cool. So I always loved the theater, and that's where I started: at a theater up in Canada.
[Toby Jones] is completely different. It's a completely different character. He's the darkest villain we've had. There was always something charming and engaging about Moriarty. There was something fascinating and actually amoral, rather than immoral, about Charles Augustus Magnussen. This guy is the purest evil. Sherlock [Holmes] is actually appalled by him.
Benedict (Cumberbatch, who is playing Sherlock) looks amazing. He's still got a Sherlockian silhouette, with a large overcoat, but in a classic cut. Watson dresses with an urban elegance, a touch of old school dashing, giving a feeling of both the military and medical profession. I suppose it's something they have in common as well. They're a bit metrosexual.
Sure, I would have loved it, if we'd gotten 2,000 screens, but I never had that delusion. I was very realistic. I think it's a success, in that it turned out funny, I got everyone I wanted to be in it, and it will get seen. The hope is that it gets a little cult following. I think people will be surprised about who's in it and how funny it is. That's my hope.
[Constant curiousity leads to happiness:] I wake up curious every day and every day I'm surprised by something. And if I can just recognize that surprise every day and say, 'Oh, that's a new thing, that's a new gift that I got today that I didn't even know about yesterday,' it keeps me going. It keeps me more than going. It keeps me enthusiastic and grateful!
I tell people, "It's the hardest thing to explain, but it's the easiest thing to understand." And all anybody really needs to know is, the struggles of life, the joy of life, the excitement and the heartbreak of life is something we can all connect to. And I like to hope that the inclusivity of the show [This Is Us] is something that audiences will relate to.
I share with a lot of people who have seen The Green film at gay film festivals when you are the only gay guy on the block, you feel this responsibility to be this ambassador. You spend a lot of time making sure that other people feel comfortable with you. The perception that we project on that community, that gets in the way of a clear line of communication.
People have a different idea of how movies are made than they really are. On a certain level, everyone throws ideas into the hopper. It's not like the actors are wind-up dolls that you push out onto the floor, play with, then put back in the box. You get people around you who you trust; the writer, the producer, the director and all the actors all contribute.
I read one time that I am permanently banned from Yankee Stadium and that I could never ever go back. This article mentioned, supposedly, that I did something in the early 2000s at Yankee Stadium, and I got arrested, and supposedly, allegedly, I went to jail for something that I did. I read that about myself one time and I thought that was pretty fascinating.
Having gandchildren you see the world through much broader perspectives. And you're more aware of your actions your thoughts and how it will affect your family. And the families around your family. You have to be a lot more careful. But you also relax a little bit. Because, you know, you've done your duty. I've reproduced and my reproductions have reproduced.
I constantly get out of my comfort zone. Looking cool is the easiest way to mediocrity. The coolest guy in my high school ended up working at a car wash. Once you push yourself into something new, and whole new world of opportunities opens up. But you might get hurt. In fact you WILL get hurt. But amazingly when you heal - you are somewhere you've never been.
I had to keep breathing. Even though there was no reason to hope... I stayed alive. I kept breathing. And one day my logic was proven all wrong because the tide came in, and gave me a sail. And now, here I am. Im back... Because now i know what I have to do now. I have to keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?
I never think of people's nationality too much. I always look at everybody the same. It's impossible for me to just say one group of people over separate groups of people. Maybe it's because I was raised in New York City which is this melting pot. Everybody was always the same and the whole point of my whole film existence was to say that we're just one race.
Generally speaking, there's a difference. Moose nose is just pure cartilage. It's not just the end of a chicken leg, it really is - imagine the cartilage of game meat.If I ever took the spare tire off of my car and was on a survival show, and Bear Grylls was like, "What you need to do in a survival situation is eat your tire," I'd be like, "That's moose nose!"
I don't feel like it's pressure. It's more of an obligation - not to entertain or be funny, but to have a certain levity. I mean, there's got to be a lightness in your leg. You have to be as light as you can be, and you don't have to be weighted down, stuck in your emotions and stuck in your body, stuck in your head. You just want to try and elevate something.