Billy Campbell Quotes

Once something is well-written, then everything else is gravy.

I would love to see a sequel to 'The Rocketeer.' I'd love to see that! I don't know that I would be in it. I may be a little long in the tooth to play 'The Rocketeer.' But I would love to be a part of that in some form or fashion.

The network wants you to make a thing that's just a stand-alone episode, so you never get any character or continuity. This is one of the ways in which television can actually be good, and even better than the movies, because it gives you a chance to tell a long story.

So many movies are so formulaic because you've got to get it done in an hour and a half. On a TV series, that's where the really interesting stuff can happen.

I shampoo only once a week or so, with tree tea oil shampoo. And when I slap moisturizer on my face - just some stuff I bought in the grocery store - I pile it through my hair.

If I ever get married, I'd like to pick a place so hard to reach that only a few people would turn up-like the North Pole. A destination wedding weeds out all the people who might potentially get their noses out of joint, so only the troupers would be there.

I don't have any complex plans for playing a character. I think all I try to do is not make too many bad guy faces and not ever try to seem too good. I just try to put it in the middle somewhere.

I've done my share of reading about Abraham Lincoln, throughout my life, and he wasn't always carved in stone. He was a human being. He was a very thoughtful, self-educated, complex, magnanimous human being, who was very, very strong, very smart and very canny, with a very strong sense of what was right and what was wrong. Through all that, he's become an icon, over the years, and some of his warmth and humanity has been lost. You don't tend to think of Lincoln as this warm, funny person, but he was.

Aside from what it teaches you, there is simply the indescribable degree of peace that can be achieved on a sailing vessel at sea. I guess a combination of hard work and the seemingly infinite expanse of the sea - the profound solitude - that does it for me.

A great deal of my battle, as an actor, is to whittle away the things that make me self-conscious and try to trick myself into not being self-conscious. So, it's always a challenge, whether I'm lying in a hospital bed or flying around with a rocket pack on my back, or what have you. On the best of days, it's a challenge for me.

To me, the AMC brand is great storytelling - they call it slow-burn storytelling.

To me, if I'm reading a fantastic story or I go on a nice first date and I have a wonderful time, I'm not gonna complain because it didn't work out. I'm gonna go on a second date.

The South Downs of England reminded me a bit of my Old Virginia homeland.

The only thing better than going to Pitcairn in the first place, is going again.

I'm not a big fan of CGI. I'm not a fan at all, unless they use it in a way that doesn't call attention to itself.

For me, the experience of making the show is very much like being in a novel. I enjoy getting the new script. I make a cup of tea and I read it the same way I would read a book, with the same amount of joy.

Vancouver is one of my favorite places on earth. It's gray and rainy there a lot of the time, but for some reason, even though it's gray and rainy, I feel like it's a sunny day.

I can't say that I haven't done some bad acting in my time. I have. Usually that involves what we actors call indicating, when you twirl your mustache.

When I first came to Hollywood, I used to dream of doing films and escaping television.

Everything about acting is a challenge. I'm self-conscious. You couldn't do anything to cause me to be more self-conscious than to stick a camera in my face and have 60 people standing behind it, waiting for me to perform.

I think it would be lovely to see some features on a disc of 'The Rocketeer,' with some reminiscing. I think that would be dynamite.

I would make a horrible politician, because I wouldn't enjoy my work.

The mood was terrible. You could see it in everybody's eyes. The body language was just defeated. When they put me in I was hoping I could give us some energy and try to bring us back.

The feeling of being at sea has put me in touch with who I am to a greater degree than if I had been on land all these years. So, in a roundabout way, I imagine it does inform my acting.

The kind of people that love 'The Rocketeer' are the kind of people that love good storytelling and innocence and a better world, so to speak, so they're almost always nice people to bump into.