Actor Quotations | Page 2

The day I showed up to South Carolina to work, I was with my kid and my ex and our dog and Kirk was hanging with this weird guy and I kind of defined the two of them by his friend and made a vow to avoid him.

No, I'm not a lager lout either. I think you have to be a massive football fan to be a lager lout.

You know that was much more of a kind of cameo, I love the movie, I love the story, I love Johnny as a fun little role but it was more of a cameo, not anywhere near as developed as this role.

I did manage to secure a feature film for 2005, though, which I'm really chuffed about.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope.

These things don't just come, arrive and settle like a bird picking up a few bits of crumbs. They develop. I think the best word for these things is develop. They develop because of the human beings who just happen to be there at the time.

This has been the best thing that ever happened to me.

When you're an actor you don't really know what you have to do until you see what you look like.

Ultimately, it has been a struggle- but I was in Minneapolis and Austin a couple of weeks ago, sitting in theaters with complete strangers watching this weird movie that Kirk and I thought up and I was excited to be making film.

They realized I was alive again, even though I was playing an old, dying sop.

When you have a performer as talented as Bill Murray or as Harold, that can write as well as they can perform, you can do a final draft on the set if you think of it that way.

I don't honestly know why they offered me the part in Rent.

Did I get jiggy with Will? I would have to say no! Did I have fun with Will? I would have to say yeah! But you know, I did not jig with the man, if you know what I'm saying!

She is up there with the best of them. I can only talk about my experience, but it was genuinely special.

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

You help families focus on the future through their children.

There just seems to be more acceptance now of... other kinds of British films, than the picture-postcard ones.

I would recommend it to everybody, every now and again you just put a dress on, see what it feels like, because it's, its interesting. A whole complex series of thoughts and feelings assail you as you look at yourself.

I've spent so much time the last seven, eight years in Los Angeles, away from my family, away from my friends, away from the city that is my favourite place to be and I just want to come here and have a proper life.

An actor is something less than a man, while an actress is something more than a woman.

And I think that at a certain point, after all the time and all the conjecture and everything that had kind of gone on surrounding this show, I think that Mitch just felt like it was time to let it go. It was best for the show.

Since an early age I was taught to be very politically aware and knew from childhood that the process was something I wanted to contribute towards if I could.

He tells you stories, but then, after a while, when you want more, he doesn't give you more. He insists on this old elaboration, the old stories that never changes.

I found the writing arena to be much less competitive.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.

There's only one shot you have at a movie, and that's your best shot. If you can't give it that, don't go. They're paying you! You gotta do a job for them.

I got a lot of flak for having Kirk as the lead because they all claimed it was a much harder sell, but no one else could have done that part for many reasons.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

I realised that the only time I really enjoyed music was when I was in the studio writing. So even though it was a six album deal, they saw quite early on that I wasn't enjoying it as I should be. I didn't feel there was anything behind it.

The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.

A lot of these people were getting to where they didn't need help anymore. You have to start all over again.

When you consider that you're a character that doesn't speak, but you've still got to react to the other actors, you've got to make a noise of some kind.

You can't do things for money. You just can't act them. There's gotta be something about the script that you really want to do. I wouldn't do a job if I didn't think I could do the best work I possibly could.

They lard their lean books with the fat of others work.

I make myself pizza if it comes down to that drastic measurement.

I think that I'm busy in the present, and I don't want to go back. Well, there's been an unauthorized biography, and you can't stop them. It didn't worry me.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

I think people forget that to be on the A list you first had to go through the original graded Parliamentary Selection Board. I did that and then like everyone else had the further interviews to get onto the A list.

I think Ian McKellen made it all happen, because he used to throw dinner parties and invite everyone over.

But I did an awful lot of work in Hollywood, and in New York for that matter.

You don't have any kind of sense of being foolish when you are acting. When you're younger you don't want to look a fool, so you don't do things that might make you vulnerable.

But a year before that, I was starting to drink beer on the set of the film Lucas (1986).

She goes on the set with headphones and gives you notes. She's terrific and I always run to her now, because she is just great to work with, as well as very good at different accents.

Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.

They call it The New Avengers but it's really the old Avengers with new people except for me, looking rather fat and rather old.

I think the things I wanted answered have been answered by people in the know that we can't talk about, so I'm perfectly happy with how Chewie came to be where he is and what is going on in Episode III.

When people come to me and tell me I was terrific in this or that, I do not want to fall flat on my face the next time. But, tough, I have fallen flat before. You just get up and dust yourself off.

I did put on weight for the last half of the film, but the Ferris wheel scene was shot with a harness on me so that if I fell I wouldn't fall all the way.

But you can't exercise and be high. It's impossible.

I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant.

I've never had a chance to sit down and enjoy what's happened - I've been too panicked about the next move. So I took some time out. I thought either I do this now or in 10 years' time I'll end up in the Priory.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

And that's what happened to that show. It started ordinary, it started really rather bad. As I said, there was a review that said, really, we think the commercials are better than the show. And then it gradually developed.

If you do one good thing, that doesn't define you either. Being around the kids in the juvenile center, they were engaging, they made us laugh but they were there for doing something terrible.

They spend an awful lot of money on I-don't-know-what in Hollywood movies; I certainly didn't get any of it. But they sure do love spending money.

I would definitely stay in the business, be behind the camera maybe.

In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read.

It doesn't get more iconic than Terry Fox.

But no, I love acting, it's a wonderful job.

I really enjoy the people. I find them to be better educated and wittier.

Specifically, we talked about making the character of the prince not so charming, at least in the beginning, and I'm playing around with the preconceptions attached to a character. That's really what intrigued me as well because I thought it would be fun to do it.

I don't want to sound smug but I am reasonably satisfied with how it's gone. I think it's fine.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

Joe Wright called me and I also had some trepidation along those lines but he said no, it would work. He had a very clear and specific idea of what he wanted to do.

It's their story, and I got to be the guy in the back while they were in the foreground.

But since day one, we've always been kinda up against it. So at the end, it's not surprising that we were kind of led along for so many months and didn't know what the fate of the show was gonna be. It was... in a weird way, just kind of that was the way it's always been.

In the case of Elektra I really wasn't sure I could pull it off. There were so many intellectual leaps. My character, Stick, is blind, but he can see better than most people. So I had trouble kind of finding the logic.

They have to exist or not in their own right. I mean, with kids, you don't say, 'Which is your favourite,' or 'Which did you enjoy bringing up the best?'

I think all of the parties still have some way to go to better utilise IT in campaigns.

My eye muscles hurt now when I read our MasterCard bill.

If you don't mind haunting the margins, I think there is more freedom there.

You just feel comfortable with him, and he certainly makes sure that you're comfortable. He makes sure that you feel good and that you're happy with what you're doing.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

I don't think a show's ever changed networks in the middle of the season before, but it was cool because they gave us those extra couple years of life that was necessary to get us to syndication.

Um, you know, they have every right to feel the way they do and things are great with me, as you see, I'm very, good shape now and on the ball. Things are happening.

It was great to do and it's exciting to do those things. That's another thing, that one enjoys the game.

The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.

Don't get me wrong, some of the mis-informed articles I have read over the last few weeks have been incredibly frustrating, but for my part I fully appreciate the opportunity I have been given and want to grasp it firmly.

The great rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you.

But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.

An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.

No, she is right up there with the best I've worked with. I was very impressed with her, I really was.

But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way.

Yeah, I'd done a bunch of pilots. Some that had gone for a while. One that went for 13 episodes. But I had never been on a show that had lasted more than that.

We meet before the movie and she gives you charts with sounds on them and makes a tape of examples. While they are setting up the scene, I go with her to the trailer and we go through the scene and correct the speech.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to.

You have to find something there that relates to the characters and reality on some level.

All we did in Alabama was have a read through with the script, but there was, 'No, well, it needs more. You've got to do this, Albert. You've got to do that, Jessica.' It didn't feel like that at all.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

It's not my goal to be a famous actor

So it wasn't actually that bad, it took a couple of weeks to sort of get used to uh, you know, standing around and pretending to have ice shoot out of your hand, but once you got used to that it uh, it was actually not that hard.

I remember the first reading of the script we had and everybody was sitting around the table. I was very impressed with the level of acting that was in the room, particularly with Jennifer who has so much responsibility.

I haven't seen the film yet because I just got in from London. In the scenes where the two characters are bantering with each other, it is like bobbing at the net in tennis.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

It was just two energies between two people, you can't prescribe that.

Maybe once in a while, you know, after a hard day of shooting or something like that, I'd kick back.

All some folks want is their fair share and yours.