Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All my friends were doing just dumb stuff that kids do, like making out with people at parties and starting to date... I didn't know any gay people growing up or any queer people growing up, and so I just really felt alone and kind of lost, and I just wasn't experiencing life.
It surprised me, the feeling I got when I won the Oscar for 'Scent of a Woman.' It was a new feeling. I'd never felt it. I don't see my Oscar much now. But when I first got it, there was a feeling for weeks afterward that I guess is akin to winning a gold medal in the Olympics.
Performance capture is a genre of acting which is not going to go away, it's going to proliferate more and more. I'm passionate about it, and I love it. It's the most liberating tool an actor has, because you are not limited by your own physicality, look, or color of your eyes.
Ask questions. Listen. Be quiet. Be willing to make a fool of yourself. Be willing to be completely exposed and to give all you've got and to be rejected for your troubles. But expect magic to happen. It just might. And don't worry about winning the audition, just win the room.
You could have a bunch of good actors but they can't keep a relationship to save their lives. Everyone thinks it's so glamorous that Ben Affleck is sleeping with all these different chicks. It's only because he can't keep a single relationship because he's working all the time.
I have been doing this since I was nine years old. So whatever the role is, I am going to do the best I can do. The only thing I am concerned with is stepping on the stage in front of that camera and giving the best performance I know I can give, day in and day out as an actor.
Actually, I think you're more stymied playing the good guy than you are the bad guy. As the bad guy, you have no inhibitions. Nothing stops you from doing what it is you feel you have to do. You do it because it's what's required. I have to protect my goddess, as best as I can.
I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal, because if you lose it, then someone's going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal, but I always write everything down... Anytime I travel, I try and fill up notepads.
Democracy if it meant what our forefathers said, that would be great but unfortunately it's been corrupted by this funding and funding of campaigns. There's a much better way to do it. There could be a small amount of money given by every taxpayer to be dedicated to candidates.
The first thing my agent told me in 1959 was he said you have to have something recognizable that people will remember. “What are you? Do you have cleft in your chin? You have a Jimmy Stewart kind of talk?” And I thought I don’t know what I can give them that will be different.
I'd rather just help people with my creative energy. I want to remind them that they're cosmic light inside physical forms and they're an incredibly special part of god's wild mind of love, but I'd love to do that in the form of playing at venues or showing a film at festivals.
I spend a part of the year in New York when based in L.A. and vice versa. It's the only way I feel balanced. Outside of theater and my community of friends out there, my family is still in N.Y., so I have a lot of reasons to spend time out there as well. I guess I'm bi-coastal.
Life was tough for me. When I was a kid, nobody played with me because they thought I looked ugly with my extra thumb. It pained me. So once I thought of getting it surgically removed. But I didn't. Slowly, I realized that the exterior is not the criterion for love and success.
We learned out craft. Acting is a craft and you must learn it. I see a lot of talent today in the kids but they don't know how to work. They don't know the craft of acting and you can only get that on the stage in theater. You cannot learn how to act in movies or in television.
That is a gift to have four weeks to rehearse something. But remember, when you're doing a play half of that time you're getting to know the play and the other actors and then finally in the third week you have it pretty much on its feet. So it's all relative in different ways.
Jackie Chan is a very good comedy/martial arts star. He does one kind of martial arts that Jet Li doesn't know how to do and Jet Li does a martial art that Jackie Chan doesn't know how to do. You can both go to two Chinese restaurants, but both can have different kinds of food.
When the mother herself kills her son she goes against her own nature, against her own instinct. People talk about 'choice', but when a woman does that, when she destroys the life of her unborn child, then we have arrived at the limit. The level cannot go higher regarding evil.
After all, when you're talking about an authority figure oppressing against people, it's the people that hold that authority figure up. If you want to get free of this bondage, then we need to think about ways to free ourselves, rather than looking to the oppressors to free us.
When you're sick, you're not thinking 24 hours a day about your suffering, about dying. You want to talk and laugh and think about other things. In the midst of trying to live your life normally, the fear and dread, the realization that it might all end, rises up inside of you.
I was born in Islington and grew up in Islington, so Arsenal was all around me, and supporting them was kind of unavoidable. The first season I started going to watch them was when we did the Double in 1971, so my first heroes were Charlie George, Ray Kennedy, and John Radford.
I loved English at school and realised I would enjoy studying plays. I got into Royal Holloway. They had a little studio theatre where we put on plays, and that's what I realised I wanted to do. So from there, I went to the Old Vic theatre school to learn how to do it properly.
It's not really an easier racket than acting is. For some reason, I guess it had - the rejection of an illustrator's life is less penetrating than the rejection of an actor's life. So I was able to manage that. But all the while, I still nursed that old dream of being an actor.
In order to be effective decision makers and to live satisfying and contented lives, people need to be aware of their goals, desires, and purposes and need to be able to evaluate or assess the extent to which they are heading in the direction specified by their inner standards.
An actor puts himself in the hands of a director. And the director's first responsibility, obviously, is to tell the story, but the smallest thing that's not true reads on the screen. So if a director sees that an actor is not believable, he needs to help him become believable.
I'm a character and relationship guy, and even with the 'Saw' films, it's special-effects people's jobs to create these scary things. It's not my job. My job is to bring some sense of humanity to the character, no matter how evil he may be. The script is going to take me there.
Chris [Nolan] comes at this with such a different take on Batman, so I didn't feel that I had to be true to any other actor playing this role. Of course, I read the comic books. His relationships with Lt. Gordon and with Batman, with Gotham City, those really helped me the most.
I remember acting in a school play about the melting pot when I was very little. There was a great big pot onstage. On the other side of the pot was a little girl who had dark hair, and she and I were representing the Italians. And I thought: Is that what an Italian looked like?
Because you are women, people will force their thinking on you, their boundaries on you. They will tell you how to dress, how to behave, who you can meet and where you can go. Don't live in the shadows of people's judgement. Make your own choices in the light of your own wisdom.
It's a huge change from when I started in the 1960s, but what is really impressive is that the number of ladies on set, the women working on set is a huge percentage. There used to be no women. It was just the leading lady's mother, perhaps the hairdresser and the makeup person.
Acting is acting, as far as I'm concerned and, you know, how you manifest it is, at the end of the day, not the point. It's how it affects the story & how it affects the audience. And if people are hungry to be told stories, using, using this form then there's a reason for that.
As an actor, I look for the part itself. I look for the story and the role. If there's no money, but it's a good part in a good role, I'll still consider it. Basically, the worse the role is, the worse the story is, and the more they'll have to pay me. It's a simple correlation.
A life of very, very serious, po-faced films would drive me nuts. I need - and I'm fortunate to have - a fairly varied menu in that respect. I mean, I was shooting 'Mamma Mia!' at the same time as I was doing Michael Winterbottom's 'Genova'. That was a very, very bizarre summer.
While American football is very structured and linear and static, where everyone lines up and there's a burst and it happens, soccer is like the cosmos. It's like constellations. It's bodies moving in space. It's a very spherical game. You can move in any direction, at any time.
Some people have different ways than yours of having fun. You can't judge 'em, you can't dismiss 'em, and you can't say, 'what an idiot, what a food.' You just have to accept their truth of their harmony with what they wanna do in their heart. As long as it's not hurting anyone.
All the downloading of films and music make sense just being able to receive the energy, that way since everything is energy, but it's also cool to have hard copies too of pieces. So I'm sure it'll be both for a very long time until we transcend into etheric cities or something.
I don't do celebrity endorsements. My work with Conservation International is a good use of whatever celebrity I might have to draw attention to important problems. I have the same responsibility as everyone to reduce consumption and to teach children to respect the environment.
If I'm walking down the street, and if a person abuses me, the dignified thing to do is to keep walking, but if that person starts throwing stones into my home and affects the well-being of me and my family, then that silence is no longer strength; that silence becomes weakness.
Every actor has an obsession with their hair. You can see it on set, and you start to realize it's completely silly. I can be very obsessed by my hair, but all these hours spent trying to style it are useless, because ultimately, you can't change your haircut. It's all the same.
I love to see lack of clarity in a performance as well as clarity, as well as trust, as well as the kinds of things that human beings go through. I love to see spontaneity and 'inevitability.' How it gets there is going to shock the hell out of me, but it will get there somehow.
What identifies an individual as a king is how other people behave towards him. All authority is assumed, and if other people don't accept your authority then you don't have it. Perhaps the critical thing to being a convincing figure of authority is actually not to try too hard.
I've been a witness to unfairness in society all my life. To the conditions under which my mother worked all her life, working in an industrial weaving shed in the north of England. And it has been this feature of unfairness that has motivated me in all of my political thinking.
From the very start in 1969, I wanted to be a part of helping our Special Olympics athletes succeed. I wanted to be on Eunice Shirver's team as another set of eyes, another set of hands and a heart working to be there for them, finding a way to help them be the best they can be.
The main thing about improvising is listening so if something happens that wasn't expected and you know your character, you know what has to happen in this scene, you can react to that in a way that's honest and it might take you in a different direction to go to the same place.
I have always been interested in theater, as an actor and as someone who looks upon theater - at the risk of sounding pretentious - as an icon by which we measure society... My life has been in the theater to an extent. It's only an extension to write, direct, produce, whatever.
Yes, every venture is always filled with apprehensions. But if we were to conduct ourselves continuously on that aspect, then we would lose the most important reason to be in this profession: to challenge the art of and be part of what is commonly known as our creative instincts.
To be married in our profession is not an easy thing. Theres too many beautiful people around, very interesting people. Its just a matter of really having-being patient and probably having the capacity and the faith of falling in love with your own wife again. That happens to me.
You do a movie [where] you like the script [and] it has something to say that you care about. And there are certain people in this industry that you kind of stick with. Guys like [“The Congressman” producer] Fred Roos. They call you, and if you’re not working, that’s what you do.
Democracy, if it meant what our forefathers said, that would be great, but unfortunately it's been corrupted by this funding and funding of campaigns. There's a much better way to do it. There could be a small amount of money given by every taxpayer to be dedicated to candidates.
My favorite vacation spot is a beautiful beach. I've been to many, many beaches on many continents: Mombasa, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Barbados, Mexico and the U.S. What's beautiful about beach communities is for whatever reason, they feel like vacation to me.
We're living in a time, unfortunately, where, you know, a lot of young men, particularly young men of color, being raised by single mothers. And their mothers so desperately want to connect with them, but I found, in talking with a lot of young men, that sometimes it's difficult.