Zachary Quinto Quotations

I don't really approach a character as to whether or not it's good or bad. I just approach a character as to where it lives in me.

I try to be as fearless as possible. I don't always succeed, but I like to think I try.

Our society needs to recognize the unstoppable momentum toward unequivocal civil equality for every gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered citizen of this country.

I would love to be a voice in this maelstrom of chaos and obsessive celebrity infatuation that says, 'Let's talk about something that matters'.

We are at the precipice of great transformation within our culture and government.

My desire to be valued is manifested in cultivating relationships with my friends and family.

What scares me? Oh, now that's a big question. I don't know what scares me - cockroaches, nuclear apocalypse. Fear is an interesting thing. It has a place in all of our lives. I try to be as fearless as possible. I don't always succeed, but I like to think I try.

We are witnessing an enormous shift of collective consciousness throughout the world. We are at the precipice of great transformation within our culture and government.

I'm a big believer in the notion that our greatest potential lies in our darkest parts. To a certain extent it's only in facing those parts of ourselves that we can truly grow, and I think that's true of all of the characters I've played, certainly in the past few years.

Heroes' really changed the game for me in a way that nothing before it had.

I don't immerse myself in the Internet chatter because it opens you up to a whole source of danger.

It is my intention to live an authentic life of compassion and integrity and action.

It became clear to me in an instant that living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality.

I believe in the power of intention to change the landscape of our society - and it is my intention to live an authentic life of compassion and integrity and action. Jamey Rodemeyer's life changed mine.

Again, as a gay man I look at that and say there's a hopelessness that surrounds it, but as a human being I look at it and say 'Why? Where's this disparity coming from, and why can't we as a culture and society dig deeper to examine that?' We're terrified of facing ourselves.

I came up during the 'Star Wars' generation and that was sort of the thing I plugged into much more. It was a little before my time and I think it was sort of grappling with these intellectual ideas that were a little advanced for my young mind. At the time. But now I have a much deeper appreciation for it.

Parents need to teach their children principles of respect and acceptance.

Gay kids need to stop killing themselves because they are made to feel worthless by cruel and relentless bullying.

I recognized that I had a window of opportunity that had opened because of my exposure as an actor.

Other actors are not my concern, and that's their life and that's their journey. Everybody has to get to a point in their own time and their own way.

Every time I get on an airplane I have a routine. I cover the inside of my nostrils with anti-bacterial ointment. I'm popping Zicam like it's candy. And I drink, literally, from L.A. to New York, six bottles of water.

I think it's like, you know, you can't get ahead of yourself, because no amount of success or exposure or opportunity is going to really matter or be ultimately fulfilling unless you can be totally present in what you're doing right now.

The interesting thing about my character Sylar is that my strengths as an actor seemed to go completely against the shape of a character in the shadow.

I find that communication as an actor and person is an important part of who I am. And I'm really drawn into the psychology of those dynamics.

I love when you aren't accountable to anybody or anything, and you can just be wherever you are.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

I would say auditioning was my real training ground. The technical aspects - like hitting marks and pacing yourself and preparing and dealing with the downtime - the first recurring role I had on 24 was probably the way I learned that stuff.

I remember [Patrick J. Adams] being in a particularly disillusioned place and really wanting your ambitions to be met with opportunity and not feeling like they were. It's all the more reason that I feel grateful to be able to stay connected and be in each other's lives. Obviously now you're in a very different place, and it's really nice to be able to look back on that and be reminded of how far we've come, at least in the opportunity aspect. The mental state aspect of it is a different story, I'm sure, but I always knew you would work.

Zoe Saldana is such an angel. She’s got such an openness and vulnerability on camera and yet such great strength. She can kick ass with the best of them, but then she can soften and open up in a way that is magnetizing whether you’re watching her on set or on screen – she’s got a real power to her. I love her; we’ve known each other for years and it’s great to come back to that kind of familiarity, especially when you’re working with such intimacy.

I think there's a tremendous sense of complacency in the LGBT community. AIDS has lost the edge of horror it possessed when it swept through the world in the '80s. Today's generation sees it more as something to live with and something to be much less fearful of. And that comes with a sense of, dare I say, laziness. We need to be really vigilant and open about the fact that these drugs are not to be taken to increase our ability to have recreational sex.

I was definitely an extroverted personality at a young age and theater was an outlet for me to channel that energy.

I found myself in a pattern of being attracted to people who were somehow unavailable, and what I realized was that I was protecting myself because I equate the idea of connection and love with trauma and death.

In light of Jamey [Rodemeyer]'s death -- it became clear to me in an instant that living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it -- is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality.

Part of being a psychopath is an ability to dissociate from one reality and create another one, completely.

My dad died when I was a kid, so I think it became a place for me to go where my mom knew that I was safe and taken care of and looked after.

It feels that way when I'm doing a play, absolutely. On film and television, it's more complicated than that I think, and when you start to add the business into the mix, and the industry into the mix, it doesn't maintain it's purity. That's something that's inevitable and unavoidable, but that's why I try to do plays as much as I possibly can.

I'm incredibly happy, I'm incredibly lucky.

What scares me? Oh, now that's a big question. I don't know what scares me- cockroaches, nuclear apocalypse. Fear is an interesting thing. It has a place in all of our lives. I try to be as fearless as possible. I don't always succeed, but I like to think I try.

We just have to have visibility. We have to have acknowledgement. We have to have accountability to how we treat one another.

There's nothing so freeing as going to rehearsal and having that experience.

It was actually pretty cool to be in Pittsburgh for those four years. I moved into the dorms and had a pretty normal college experience, even though it was in my hometown. I really thrived there. I feel like it really suited me and served me well in terms of how I grew up there.

But when I found out that Jamey Rodemeyer had made an It Gets Better video only months before taking his own life, I felt indescribable despair.

My first job was a show called The Others. I had, like, three lines. Julianne Nicholson was in it, and Gabriel [Macht]. I remember Gabriel wasn't there the day I was, but he sent a note, because he went to Carnegie Mellon as well, so we knew each other a little bit through that, and he was so sweet and generous. It was meant to be a recurring role that would evolve on the show, but the show only lasted a little while and I ended up only doing that one episode.

We did monologues and scenes, and New York I did a scene from Amadeus and a monologue from Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead by Eric Bogosian, and then in L.A. I switched the scene to This is Our Youth and did the same monologue. I was spiky-haired, super skinny. A lot of people were like, "You should come here and do a sitcom." That was the feedback that I got. Obviously it was quite a different journey than the one I've actually had, but I just listened to people.

Who's to say what would have happened if I had trusted my instincts and moved to New York like I thought I would.

When I got out of school, it used to be that it was theater actors that ended up doing film and television, and you had to come from the theater to be taken seriously in that world.

I think somewhere in the '90s, it started to shift, and you started to see a lot of film and television actors doing theater, and producers using the notoriety of the film and television actors to sell tickets.

My return to the theater in New York was so specific. I didn't want it to be about leveraging my exposure or my fame, so the first show I did in New York was an ensemble piece at an Off-Broadway theater, and I wanted to make sure that it was just about the play and about the experience.

The play I did on Broadway a couple of seasons ago started out of town and it moved its way into New York because of the experience that we had out of town.

I remember having to hit a mark and having no idea how to do it, real childlike stuff, because Carnegie Mellon didn't do an extensive job preparing us for film and television. It was very much a theater program. That was my first job. It was cool. I was glad it was.

I think I integrated that over the first couple of years that I was out of school, mostly in auditions, to be honest.

I loved auditioning because it was just an opportunity to act. Whether or not I got the job was the next hurdle, but the idea that I would get to act that day was the thing that excited me the most about it.

I had to learn how to modulate my performances and interpretations of these roles in auditions for the camera.

I found it was remarkable. It was so evocative. I feel like it captured the urgency and the chaos, but through the silence of it, through the slowness of it. That's what I loved the most about Citizenfour.

It certainly woke me up to how vulnerable we all are. I think I was much more cavalier about it before I started working on the movie [Edward Snowden], and then the more I read the documents themselves and saw just how sweeping and indiscriminate the intrusions into our privacy have been, it made me more aware.

It didn't really change my opinion about [Edward] Snowden all that much, but I definitely feel like as a culture, it gave us information that generated a responsibility to protect ourselves as much as we can and also a responsibility to hold our government accountable to honoring our constitutional rights.

They're mounting a campaign right now with the ACLU and a lot of different organizations advocating for [Edward Snoden] pardoning before [Barack] Obama leaves office. Wouldn't it be incredible to see something like that happen? I don't know what we can expect. I am interested in the different points and perspectives that people have.

While we were shooting the movie, we shot in the actual hotel in Hong Kong where it all went down, the Mira Hotel. Laura Poitras was coming to Hong Kong to do a screening of Citizenfour, and she ended up staying at the Mira Hotel. It was her first time back in Hong Kong, and I ran into her in the elevator. Literally I had just finished shooting one day, and I came back to the hotel and she was in the elevator.

I think the goal is always to go deeper within myself, and accept myself on deeper levels and to know myself on deeper levels. Whether or not I look for roles that are going to do that for me, I certainly look for the ways in which the roles I get can do that for me.

My relationship with Leonard [Nimoy] was a byproduct of playing Spock that I never would have imagined, but the more I got to know him, the more I realized, there are no mistakes. I'm playing this role for very specific reasons, and maybe those reasons have to do with where I am creatively in my life, but maybe they have to do with where I am personally in my life. Leonard was such a teacher for me.

Leonard [Nimoy] was such a teacher for me. He was one of the most fully realized human beings I have ever known on every level - in his personal life with his personal relationships and his love for his wife and his evolution with his family. Then as an artist, as an actor, as a writer, as a poet, and as a photographer. He never stopped.

I feel like that [the role in Star Trek] is a prime example of, yeah, I got that role and it was awesome, because it changed a lot for me professionally, but then creatively, it became a whole other thing, with J.J. [Abrams] and Chris [Pine] and the people I got to know. Now I just feel like it's our jobs to be open and to keep moving stuff forward. I don't know what that means. This is the first time in a long time that I have no idea what's happening next. As scary as that is, and as anxiety-provoking as that can still be, it's also really exciting.

I probably get eight straight hours of acting in an entire season or two seasons of Suits. It's broken into such small pieces.

I remember standing outside of the dorm by the little terrace. I was going to do this job that I wasn't 100 percent certain of, which ended up being much more fun than I expected [in So Notorious ].

[Edward Snoden] has said many times that he's willing to come back and face trial if he can be guaranteed a fair trial, but the likelihood of that is so slim.

Even the former Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder has come out to say that he believed that [Edward] Snowden performed a public service, and I couldn't agree more.

What we do with the information now is up to us, but certainly I have a lot of respect for the courage and integrity that was required for [Edard Snowden] to take that action.

I've had some pretty stimulating conversations about where we are politically as a result of this movie [Edard Snoden], but then there are a lot of questions just about that sensationalism of it.

People always ask me what I think, if Edward Snoden is a hero, if he's a villain. I don't really tend to moralize it so much as I feel like he's a whistleblower. He's someone who saw a wrongdoing and in order to shine a light on that wrongdoing had to bend some rules and break some laws along the way.

It's a very complicated landscape and I don't think there's one easy answer about it [Edard Snowden movie].

It makes sense that it's so different from film and television, because it's so in-depth. As actors, when we're in film or television, we can have transcendent moments and we get to work with really creative and incredible people, but it's such a small percentage of your time that's about your process.

We [with Neal Dodson and Corey Moosa] were constantly looking for features and looking for ways to get involved with people who were making stuff.

It's funny that you [Zachary Quinto] did a monologue from Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead. I did the same thing for my university when I went to USC.

I had just gotten Heroes, and I had just found out that I was going to be doing [Star] Trek, and I thought it was probably a good idea for me to create an infrastructure that would allow me to do my own work and put my stuff into the world.

I actually met one of my business partners [Neal Dodson] at the Governor's School summer program, so we've known each other since we were 15 and 16 years old, and we both ended up at Carnegie Mellon together. He started working for a producer out of school after a few years, and then we started the company together.

I remember our conversations [with Zachary Quinto] always being frustrated that we weren't doing what we wanted to do, but also filled with the determination that we were going to overcome that.

I knew I needed a partner. I needed someone who could focus on and spearhead the business side of things, and [Neal Dodson] was great at that. That's how it started.

I remember Zachary Quinto were just about to go and do So Notorious on VH1, and I was super unemployed, and I think we spent a lot of time talking about how we weren't particularly happy.

I met Glenn [ Greenwald] briefly in 2009. We were both guests on Real Time With Bill Maher. I was the show's guest and he was on the panel. But this was before the Snowden stuff happened. I didn't have the opportunity to meet him in preparation for the movie, unfortunately, for various reasons. But I was able to dive into the main articles he's written, and interviews with him, and just the function that the character serves in the movie, that was enough for me.

J.C. [Chandor] was the kind of energy we were looking for, so we decided to get behind it with all of our effort. That was the beginning of our relationship with first-time feature directors, and that's when it became really important to us, watching them thrive and grow in a creative environment in which you can do that was really key. Also his work checked all the boxes, because it was socially relevant and intellectually driven, and creatively exciting.

Our third partner [with Neal Dodson] was this other guy called Corey [Moosa], and he came in with good ideas and also some access to money, and so we joined forces and drew up a business plan and got financing for the beginnings of the company. We had no idea what we were doing really. We just started looking through material and started producing our own stuff.

We [with Neal Dodson and Corey Moosa] spent a lot of time writing, for lack of a better word, this manifesto about what we wanted to do. We wanted to find work that was relevant socially and that didn't take audiences for granted.

We [with Neal Dodson and Corey Moosa] wanted to draw people in with a dialogue - whether it's a creative process or a social issue or innovation of some kind; whether it was how we told the stories or what stories we told. We produced some online videos.

It just so happened that J.C.[Chandor] was a first-time feature director, and his script was exactly the kind of thing we were looking for.

Heroes and Star Trek were 2006 and 2007, and I was just about to turn 30, and everything changed. I found myself on this amazing journey, which continues, but it's now at a natural transition point. I'm reevaluating and reexamining how and where I go from here.

I've been looking for ways to audition more, because it also keeps me sharp and keeps my ambition at its firm edge. That's something that I'm actively engaged in conversations about now with my reps: What's out there that I can really either put myself on tape for, or meet with the director for and read for? How do we do that? We're now at the end of the Star Trek reboot trilogies and whether we are going to do another movie remains to be seen, and so I feel like I'm at the end of this cycle that began with me coming out of school and auditioning and building my way up.

If it was a biopic about Glenn Greenwald, I would have immersed myself more fully in his personal life and gotten to know him as much as I could, but because it was much more about his relationship to this particular situation, to The Guardian, to Laura Poitras, and to Ewen MacAskill, and Edward Snowden, I was able to really learn a lot about him from reading his book and reading his many articles and accounts of that time.

Maybe it's because it's connected to my childhood, or it's connected to the origins of what drove me creatively, but I feel like my life never makes more sense than when I'm in that process.

I only auditioned at four schools. I started performing and studying when I was in middle school, and then as I got into high school, it just got more serious. I feel like it became more of a vocation. It became clear to me at that point that I wanted to pursue it.

I went to high school directly across the street from Carnegie Mellon, actually, and I knew people that were a couple of years older than me that went there. I was able to see shows in the drama department, and hang out there little bit, and it just felt like a natural progression. It was at the top of my list.

There was a little bit of hesitancy about staying in Pittsburgh and not moving away for college, but that didn't last long. It was right in line with what I wanted, so I auditioned there and it wasn't a tough decision.

There was no other concern; there was no other focus [in the Governor's School]. It was simply there to learn and grow and perform, and that was pretty amazing and informative. I'd say that was a big pivotal moment for me.

I came back and decided that I wanted to go to college for acting and got my family on board. My mom, who was a single mom, was a little reticent, but I think after that summer [in the Governor's School], she saw a shift in me and realized that it was something I wanted more than just a hobby.

Honestly, people told me to. It was weird, I graduated from school, I never thought I'd live in L.A. and I always wanted to be to New York. I assumed that would be my trajectory - that romantic ideal of moving there and doing plays Off-Broadway and being scrappy about it. Then we did a showcase in New York and a showcase in L.A., and for whatever reason the response that I generated in L.A. was significantly more enthusiastic.

I went away to this summer program after my junior year of high school. They used to have this thing called the Governor's School, and they had it for different disciplines - science, math, performing arts. I auditioned and I got accepted, and it was an eight-week program away from home. I went for acting. I was 15, and I turned 16 while I was there, so that was a seminal moment for me. It made me realize the life of it, the discipline of it, and the joy of that discipline, where it was all we did.

I also feel like the kinds of jobs I want right now - I consider them aspirational. I want to raise the bar for myself, and I am in this interesting spot where I do get offered a lot of things, but frankly, the majority of the things I get offered I'm not really interested in doing. I want to do the things that I have to fight for.

I want to be working with directors who are at the top of their game. I want to be raising the bar for myself, and to me, the best way to do that is to prove to them that I'm the best for this job.

The situation they [journalists and Edward Snowden] were in was incredibly heightened. The stakes were high. There was a lot of pressure, a lot of tension, a lot of sense of claustrophobic, clandestine energy that I think was exhilarating for us to explore and recreate. We were fortunate to shoot a fair amount of our stuff at the actual hotel where it all happened in Hong Kong. That added another element of very similitude to the situation, so I feel like it was exciting.

I was aware of it but I think I was aware of it abstractly, theoretically. You know I understood who Edward Snowden was and what he did but I didn't really see the relevance that it bore in my life and doing film changed that tune pretty quick.

I saw how vulnerable we all are and how exposed we all are and how this is an issue that affects everyone who owns a piece of technology. Which is certainly most people in this country.