Actor Quotations | Page 5

I had no money at all back then. I was later paid $600 a week for The Dirty Dozen, which was lovely, after having no money for years.

I'm interested in what makes ordinary people, like yourself, tick the way you do. And the way I tick. And the way somebody else ticks.

I'm really keen to go back and do some theatre, but I can't afford to at the moment because we're getting married in September. And then I'm hoping to direct a film at the end of this year, and that means a year of your life without pay.

I have no desire at all to eat liver.

I'm living in L.A. but my heart's in Vancouver.

I love doing this day, and George was exactly as he's always been, very calm and very gentle, and if I'm in the final cut in the summer theater, I'll be thrilled. If I'm not, well that's the way things go.

I'm 25, so I've already gone through what my character Ged goes through, though it's on a general scale because I haven't studied at a wizard's school.

No, I was working in Canada. In fact, the man who asked me to be in The Avengers, I told him, what do I need to be in that, I'm a producer now.

No, Jar Jar Binks was fine by me but probably went on a little bit too long. When they were in trouble and were battling, it should have been more serious and it became a bit too silly.

I've had it. I did 4,700 episodes. Isn't that enough?

So already, you go from not having a job and thinking you're going to get fired after the pilot, to knowing that you've got a guaranteed job for 4 years.

I'm fairly gregarious, and if I've been away for a while and I get home, I go out with my friends to this great thing in England called the pub.

The agency was desperate to get started with the commercials in 1976, but I was working on Star Wars.

I try to honor that bargain that I made with myself that I wouldn't do this work unless I really felt the need to. I just didn't see the point.

Not much to be perfectly honest! I thought The Phantom Menace was terrible, except for the Pod Race.

I want to say, strenuously, that although I have never considered the Darcy thing to be a problem, that is simply not going to happen.

It's really important to me to keep growing and keep finding new things.

It's really exciting stuff, but I can't talk about it at the moment.When they told me what they had in store for Nick, I couldn't really refuse.

I wanted to play a character that had clarity and knew what they wanted; I felt the distilled difference between myself and the character.

It took so much of the tension out of me that my friends and family won't see me on this show.

I like to know where I'm going to be at seven o'clock.

I have this cozy house here and I get three pensions from the States. I've done nicely.

I think Alison Krauss and her band are the best today. The same goes for Rick Skaggs and his band.

I really believed that if I could play that character, who is grounded in the earth and the history of the United States - not the kind of role I usually play - it would help me change the perception out there and my own perception of what I can accomplish as a performer.

I have talent. I know it. I've been doing this for 30 years. But at the same time, you not only have to be good; you have to be good in hits.

I just had the feeling that by the time all these kids grow up, as many of them who love Superman will love Zod. And I think that's come to pass!

In this film, we took a helicopter up and showed London as a vista, which is not very often done.

I have to know what would've happened if I tried to get into show business. The last thing I was expecting was to have the kind of career I've had.

But I am Armenian and I understand what it is to lose a country and lose a family and have massacres and genocides and everything against my people.

By then of course I knew my voice would be overdubbed and I wasn't worried about saying my lines quite as correctly as I did in the first film.

I love the comradery of doing theatre that you don't get in film.

But, you know, as you get older, my God, the parts get more varied. There's a lot of fun to be had doing a lot of different things.

By the end of last year we solved a lot of threads, and it's really good for this new way we're taking the show to really have these new people and these new energies, frankly.

I play the role of Tabitha Lenox in 'Passions', and yes, I think there are similarities. I believe in magic and am interested in the spirit of life, reincarnation and the powers of the mind and positive thinking.

I don't plan on digging that stuff up that I've kept down with my feet. Why would I want to dig it all up and examine it like an archaeologist?

I don't really look back at all. When I've made a film, I've made it. They kind of go out into the world and they're on their own really.

I don't know how directors do it. They must have so much going on in their head all the time. I don't think that's ever going to happen to me.

I pick up a lot of stuff from them, but I don't think there's any great trick to acting.

The truth of the matter is I stayed in L.A. raising my children, and when they went to college, I packed my bags along with them and came to New York and looked for parts in the theatre, because that's always what I preferred doing.

It was male chauvinism, as you must realize, in the 1960s, particularly in the entertainment business, which was pretty repulsive.

It was nice, though, to have the long term benefit to be able to pare away those things and eventually make the character my own and put my own unique stamp.

I received quite a lot of ribbing whenever I went into the bank and people were always offering me Havana cigars - it was very nice.

I never try to completely do a character, if you know what I mean. I always feel like I'm just being me, but in the character's situation.

I never wanted to be a film director but after this experience I really loved it. I would love to do more documentaries but it's difficult to find backing for them.

The most precious things in speech are pauses.

An emotional performance is usually more instinctive to an actor.

Any man who has $10,000 left when he dies is a failure.

After working in the corporate world of advertising and graphic design, I know how hard the average person works, because I've been there.

You want to have a critical success and you want people to go see it. It's disappointing if something's well reviewed and no one goes to see it.

The drama critic for The Montreal Gazette gave me a good review in a high-school production of Pride and Prejudice. It went to my head.

You've got to have steel in you somewhere.

The children are grown up and left home.

This is a huge budget movie so it was amazing to see just how he knew what he wanted. I mean, that's all you can ever ask for from a director.

You can't always go by the book, even in comedy.

A lot of love stories, when they come to the end, they end. We kind of pick up the storyline, and I figure that's what makes it interesting.

You can't when you're filing, you're just busy, but I didn't see... I used to come home and my girl would make me dinner and it was lovely.

And one of the odd things about it is that poetry is now fleeing from the academies to another institution, which is the performance poetry.

And I watch my friends, most of whom are in academic life because most poets have to be in academic life, there aren't so many other ways to survive.

The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.

Accept everything about yourself -- I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end -- no apologies, no regrets.

Then I put on the new suit they'd made and it felt wonderful to climb back into it and feel the character coming back out again.

Then there's going to be another project I am involved with, in fact, I'm going back to film it next week. It's a game for the Internet called Advance Warriors, and my character is Max, who is blind, but he has special powers. It will be a new game played on the Internet.

It's not like you are a rock star and your freedom is infringed upon, but it's just nice. Especially in the movies when you are working in the dark.

It's not remotely sentimental, you know what I mean. It's brutally honest, and I think often hilarious, but it's a sad movie, it's sad and truthful.

It's nice because working in England I'm know for working in television and theater when you get a chance to come out, it is quite fun to be out from behind the mask. You need to let people know who you are.

As a director he was not that interested in Vader.

You can time a part perfectly and play it badly. And some people have very individual offbeat timing, which is their own. It works simply because they are who they are.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

It's just I fell into a bunch of movies that kind of fit in my life. It made sense to do them in the '80s. Folks who know me think it's hilarious.

It's a complete illusion, this notion. We create for ourselves this strange delusion that we exchange our lives for someone else's.

It was a show that you played at home and you're saying to the contestant do this and do that. When you at home are involved in yelling at the screen, then you know you've got an audience.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

It's fun to play the character and then watch him later.

It's hard to improvise that kind of stuff, whereas the McKenzies are easy to improvise, because it's the two of us, and the material is pretty basic.

There were a lot of reasons I chose Grounded for Life - my family was close by and I didn't have to travel, and I loved the cast so much.

I began writing after my child was seriously hurt in a daycare center accident, and I wanted to come home to be with her during her recovery.

I could have stayed in L.A. and done sitcoms for awhile and will probably go back and do one I hope.

I don't like to cry in public, unless I'm getting paid for it.

I came here in 1974 to do a play, and then I went to L.A. I really like living in America. I feel more at home here than anywhere else.

I couldn't be playing him for this long if I didn't like him.

I don't think the pilot worked particularly well, because the setting was terrestrial rather than otherworldly, in space or whatever.

I do believe in living out your own time, unless it's absolutely impossible, which it is for some people.

I don't like sitting around sets - I don't like the unpredictability of it.

For some reason, it popped into my head the notion that a lot of the Next Generation cast in the long run of that show managed to step behind the camera.

For pragmatic reasons, I love the routine. I love the structure of it. I love knowing that my days are free. I know where I'm going at night. I know my life is kind of orderly. I just like that better.

If God had intended us to fly, he would never have given us the railroads.

And, I'd never done Tennessee Williams, and I had done Broadway musicals, so it was a challenge.

The main problem is gluing the beard on. It takes 15 minutes, but I could have a really complicated scene to play and worry more about the beard.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

Knowledge cultivates your seeds and does not sow in you seeds.

Yesterday is but today's memory, tomorrow is today's dream.