Kevin Spacey Quotes - Page 4

I can't judge the characters I play, because it's for the audience to do. What I can try to do is to understand and embody what were they going through? How did they make the decisions they made? That to me is a more interesting way to approach something, rather than saying this person is a villain and that person is this and - because it's not very interesting to play that anyway.

If it were not for people who stepped forward and gave me opportunities at a time when I had not proved myself at all, believe me, I would not have a career.

The process of doing a play is an organic one and the process of doing a film is totally un-organic.

Its the details and the human element that makes Recount entertaining. Even though we know how the election ends, it plays like a thriller. Its also funny.

I can't imagine that anyone in Hollywood is sitting around trying to decide what actor is good or right or qualified for a role and is being denied a role because of their political views. I don't think that's the way Hollywood works. We're not living in an era of blacklisting.

For me, coming to work every day has turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be.

The audience, the place youre in, has everything to do with how your performance goes.

Studios and networks who ignore either shift - whether the increasing sophistication of storytelling, or the constantly shifting sands of technological advancement - will be left behind.

I think that there is no doubt that every experience you have in your life, whether it's playing a character or something else, you bring that to the work.

You can't win a marathon without putting some bandaids on your nipples!

Sometimes you walk away from playing somebody and you think, "Wow that was far as from my own experience as I can possibly be." And sometimes you walk away thinking, "Wow. There are qualities in that character that I didn't realize I had." And those can be both interesting and uncomfortable.

I'm aware that, from the outside, this looks like I've got quite an ego.

If you ignore the murdering and the conniving, Francis Underwood is an effective politician.

[What's my favourite book?] It changes all the time.

Sometimes I'll be flipping through the channels and I'll see a movie I'm in. And I'll probably stop and think, 'Sure, I'll watch this.'

The characters created cannot just be a mouthpiece for the writer. When you look at a piece of writing, and it's genuine and it doesn't feel like every character is just a mouthpiece for the writer, but that they've been created in such a way that they're expressing an idea that a writer wants to get across, that's when a story succeeds.

When the story is good enough, people can watch something three times the length of an opera.

While the sciences are hugely important, let us not leave behind a childs imagination.

At the end of the day, storytelling is actually very simple in its origin as long as there are people who want to tell stories and there are people who want to hear them.

I always thought that, in a way, you want your Superman to be a total unknown.

My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge, and, at least once a day, retiring to the men's room so I can jerk off while I fantasize about a life that doesn't so closely resemble Hell.

I think that when you put yourself, as actors have to do, in other people's shoes, when you have to put on the costume that someone else has worn in their life, it gets much, much harder to be prejudiced against them and even to be - to not try to look at the world in a sense of "I'm not going to judge somebody. I'm going to try to understand who they are and what they're about."

Being an actor sometimes requires that you ask yourself questions youd rather not know the answers to.

The audience has spoken. They want stories. They’re dying for them. They’re rooting for us to give the right thing. And they will talk about it, binge on it, carry it with them on the bus and to the hairdresser, force it on their friends, tweet, blog, Facebook, make fan pages, silly GIFs, and god knows what else about it..

I'm a relatively ugly character who's done pretty damn well in film.