20th-century Actor Quotes

I've always hated the way I looked, and I've never complained about my brains.

Richard Griffiths

There's so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end I tell him nothing. I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette.

If you can do a part and not have the acting show.

Of the many horrors of divorce, the most egregious is that it robs a kid of the best of both worlds. Dads can do many things that even the best moms can't, and vice versa.

We used to get arrested every other week — that is, the old man would get arrested.

I guess the one thing I really learned from participating in sports was to just never say "no", never stop trying, and to always believe that you can do better than the next fellow. I tried to follow this throughout my life, but I always tried to be respectful about it.

Women liked me because I made them laugh. And what is an orgasm, except laughter of the loins?

If a director wants to give me a job, I sometimes ask them to screen-test me. Then they can't sort of blame me if they're not getting what they wanted later on. It's like, "You fucking hired me; you saw what you were getting."

Drew Barrymore: Eddie Vedder said something like, "The more you're known as a personality, the less you're accepted as an entertainer."
Edward Norton: I would agree with that. On the other hand, I hate the "dark prince" act that some actors put on when they're doing publicity. If it's for real, if you're really a dark prince, then don't sit down with an interviewer and act like a dark prince. I don't necessarily love doing these things, but once you've agreed to do them, I think you ought to get on board.

When you have a precedent set like that, and you have somebody, George Tenet, acknowledging in his book that he knew that the administration was deceiving the American people into a situation that is murdering young men and women from this country and others, that George Tenet and Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and George Bush, et al., should be in fucking jail.

I truly believe that when you're funny, you're blessed. Your whole life is kind of golden. I was happy, although it was not perfect happiness. There was illness and sadness and death.

Comedy is like a sweet. On auspicious occasions and during celebrations sweets are always offered. We offer a unique flavour.

A line has length, but no breadth. If you could see it, it wouldn't be a line.

I'm really concerned about the quality of education in the United States. I think it's going down, and I don't think we spend enough money on it. It's unhealthy for our society that we remove ourselves more and more every day from books, from reading, from writing. All areas of education need more emphasis. I think we're a bit lazy here in America. I believe in the ideal of the classic liberal education, and I also think athletics are very important to the education of young people.

Tommy Lee Jones

I'm glad to see [drinking is] coming back these days, particularly in the young — at least they've got good taste. Because I could never connect with my friends who were on drugs. They were in a totally gaga world, but at least booze — you could be violent, you could be funny, you could tell stories. It was a much more gregarious form of anathematizement.

Christopher Plummer

I thought the script was very good, but something was missing. I wanted to come out with a cane, come down slowly, have it stick into one of the bricks, get up, fall over, roll around, and they all laugh and applaud. The director asked, 'what do you want to do that for?' I said from that time on, no one will know if I'm lying or telling the truth.

I believe in committed cinema.
I mean, commitment in the broadest sense of the term.

There is an element of performance to leadership, because you're on public display, and I suppose I must be attracted to that. Although, probably more than the leadership, I'm more attracted to characters who are quite extreme, and could be considered borderline monsters. It's something you can get your teeth into, and I find the psychology fascinating. It's interesting that in searching for monsters to play, you often end up playing leaders.

I have little patience with anyone who is not self-satisfied. I am always pleased to see my friends, happy to be with my wife and family, but the high spot of every day is when I first catch a glimpse of myself in the shaving mirror.

They say the bad guys are more interesting to play but there is more to it than that — playing the good guys is more challenging because it's harder to make them interesting.

Lecturing is that mysterious process by means of which the contents of the note-book of the professor are transferred through the instrument of the fountain pen to the note-book of the student without passing through the mind of either.

I feel passionate about things. And I feel things deeply, and that's always the way I've been taught, right from the beginning, that the deeper you feel something the better the acting..... and then it's also the person you're playing. If you're playing someone who's upset or yelling, that's what you gotta do. That's the job.

Golf is not, on the whole, a game for realists. By its exactitudes of measurement it invites the attention of perfectionists.

Heywood Hale Broun

I'm not an actor, and I enclose my press cuttings to prove it.

A good marriage is like an incredible retirement fund. You put everything you have into it during your productive life, and over the years it turns from silver to gold to platinum.