Christopher Walken Quotes

Laurence Olivier said in an interview once that when he plays a tragedy he always aims for the funny parts, and the other way around. Because in a comedy you look for what's serious. I think that's true. Sometimes things are really funny if you're absolutely earnest. If you're really serious, it's hilarious.

I'm not much of an analyzer or a psychologist.

Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. I never know how successful a movie is going to be - when you make a movie you're always hoping for the best.

If I show somebody something that I've written and they say, "Eh...alright," I just put it away and I never show it to anyone again. But I know people who won't take no for an answer, and eventually someone pays attention.

I'm better off not socializing. I make a better impression if I'm not around.

My life is really quite conservative. I've been married nearly 50 years. I don't have hobbies or children. I don't much care to travel. I've never had a big social life. I really just stay home, except when I go to work.

Of course they may have corrected it by now, but the original titles at the end of Annie Hall say "Christophe Vlaken." It was just inconceivable. These things are checked...I don't know what that was about. I'd never seen or heard of it. How they came up with the name Christophe Vlaken, it must've been a conspiracy. I did ask about it but nobody knew.

Older actors, and women in particular, are getting more opportunities. It pleases me, its very good news for us. They say that people are living longer, and maybe it's just that there's more of us out there.

Movies are terrifically optimistic enterprises.

It's impossible for me to play a part without thinking about the audience.

I think that if I had grown up and had been in show business and the movies twenty five, thirty years earlier, I think I would have made a lot more musical movies.

I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.

I used to love Danish. My father used to make a Boston cream pie. You never see that anymore.

To be honest, I was never very ambitious. And I still am not.

Emotional power is maybe the most valuable thing that an actor can have.

I've made one or two movies that I haven't even seen, because they were never released. I have made things that I never even saw. But I will always go see the movie I'm in.

Well, you know what they say. A bullet always tells the truth.

I don't have kids. Maybe that's kept me young. I have a wife for almost 50 years and she looks after me a little bit like I was seven years-old.

Even in the limo, I buckle my seatbelt. I got that seatbelt on before the car moves.

I'd love to do a character with a wife, a nice little house, a couple of kids, a dog, maybe a bit of singing, and no guns and no killing, but nobody offers me those kind of parts.

Obvious things like The Deer Hunter. After that happened, the scripts got better. Opportunities happened.

I've made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you're in a movie and you think, 'I wish more people saw that' - because you're good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that's show business.

When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It's hard to keep going when you don't get any better.

I'm scared of everything. I think it's only sensible to be that way.

I've made movies that we're very successful that we're a complete surprise, and I've made movies that I thought we're going to be very successful that, you know.

I come from a part of New York that was almost entirely immigrants. I was born in America, but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe.

Too many young actors are strutting about and doing films without having developed some of the depth you need to bring off certain kinds of roles. I think that's the problem with the system, where a lot of younger actors who haven't had a chance to develop suddenly become stars.

I think all men when they get older, they look at the mirror and they probably see their father a little bit.

I was never a child actor. I was a child performer.

At its best, life is completely unpredictable.

Some people can do things and get away with it. Comics are famously like that. Why is it that some guys can say the most horrible things and it's not offensive, it's funny?

An actor really is a kind of intermediary between an audience and the piece, whether it's a play or movie.

I've been married for 46 years, and I live in a nice house, my grass is always cut, I pay my bills, and my cat loves me!

In England, and all over Europe, and all over the world, actors act until they die. They get old, really old, and they're still working. They just keep doing it.

I want to make movies on a soundstage. They close the door and it's nighttime, daytime. If it has to rain, they make the rain. That's what I like.

You hear about things happening to people - they slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other way - and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something; you don't want to die in some unnecessary way.

I remember that. I was talking to him and I said how great it would be if actors had a tail because I have animals and a tail is so expressive. On a cat you can tell everything. You can tell if they're annoyed. You can tell whether they're scared.

Everybody has to be a little lucky, I think.

Quite often, I'll be sent a script for a movie. And I find that I like it, so I say I'll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it Walkenising.

Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew. It's a rhythm thing - people who speak English where they have to hesitate and think of the right word. And I think it rubbed off.

In the theater you rehearse for a minimum of five to six weeks. And then you get to play it. Which means you get to get better. That's the great thing about the theater.

I try not to worry about things I can't do anything about.

It's true that I don't think I'd be a good director. If I were a director, I'd try to hire the best people I could and then leave them alone. I don't know much about cameras or lighting, so I'd make sure that I had a really good cameraman who understood lenses and lighting, and I say to him, "This is the scene we have to shoot and this is what I think it should be, you go do it." Same with actors. But really, very good directors who know everything do basically the same thing. They hire you and then they leave you alone.

My father was a lesson. He had his own bakery, and it was closed one day a week, but he would go anyway. He did it because he really loved his bakery. It wasn't a job.

Also for me it was different because I play a lot of villains and in this one I play a dad and I play a good guy, basically. He's the Secretary of the Treasury. I never had a job like that.

I always like to watch comics and it's interesting that you can tell if someone's funny in 10 seconds.

I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.

I play disturbed people a lot, but always with a bit of distance or tongue-in-cheek. Most of the villains I play are essentially harmless.