David Duchovny Quotes

Without whining and without making myself a tragic figure, there is no replacement for the loss of your privacy. It's a huge sacrifice.

I don't think I'd ever be cruel to an animal.

Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within.

My entire life has been an attempt to get back to the kind of feelings you have on a field. The sense of brotherhood, the esprit de corps, the focus - there being no past or future, just the ball. As trite as it sounds, I was happiest playing ball.

Humility is considered an un-masculine quality.

A dream is the mind's way of answering a question it hasn't yet figured out how to ask.

I'm not a comic book character. I'm not Indiana Jones or Bond, I'm a flesh and blood guy who is ageing and changing. I don't have to do what I did in '93. I couldn't do it and thank God.

I'm not going to give up. I can't give up. Not as long as the truth is out there.

Chemistry is really about two people who like to act together, I think. It's like tennis in the most cliched way. It's like if you hit the ball, they hit the ball back, and they don't hit it into the stands, and they don't put the ball in their pocket and walk off - and they don't argue with the umpire, you know?

I'm a big Philip Roth fan. I think "American Pastoral" is the great American novel of the past 30 to 40 years. It's a novel about what happened in the 1960s, and I think America is still dealing with what happened then. It's devastatingly sad.

I will read biographies or autobiographies while I'm writing, but mostly I put books in a to-read queue, like Rachel Cusk's new novel, "Outline."

As names that can mean things, I prefer spiritual to a lot of other things.

I'll instinctively know that I identify with a character.

Becoming an actor made me way more interested in plot.

You're raising a kid and you give it food and shelter and, most importantly, you give it the feeling that it's special. I think people react to celebrities like that - I mean, they treat celebrities like children.

I don't think you could function on set if you think like that. I think once you start to think of the impact, then you're not really coming from a truthful place. I think the best thing to do for me is what's worked in the past.

If Fox Mulder discovered that Larry Sanders was a clone? I think he would stab him . . . but it wouldn't be with an ice pick.

People are really much more respectful than they're made out to be and much more discerning about the fact that I'm not the character I play.

If I were gay, you know. I think Woody Allen is one of a long list of men I might go gay for.

I poop in the backyard... I wear disposable diapers.

I really like gratuitous nudity. I hate when people go, 'I'll only do it if it makes sense for the movie'. It never makes sense. So I like it - the more gratuitous the better.

Part of being an actor is letting things come about organically as opposed to forcing them.

In this age of media and Internet access, we are much more talkative than ever before.

The key is to get to know people and trust them to be who they are. Instead, we trust people to be who we want them to be - and when they're not, we cry.

I don't need my phone to play me music. I need it to be a phone and an e-mail thing.

One of the great things about doing series television is the guest actors that you can have come on and play around with.

Fame does lead to money, which I don't have a close relationship with. I'm the kind of guy who never sees the money - it all goes somewhere else. I don't understand it, I don't like to deal with it. I have a fear of not having it, because I grew up without it.

I always dreamt of being a basketball player. A dream that only I believed in.

If young actors ask me things, I always tell them to get on set and watch how it's done. If you can, watch the people that you like, how they work.

On the one hand, people think they own kids; they feel that they have the right to tell the kids what to do. On the other hand, people envy kids. We'd like to be kids our whole lives. Kids get to do what they do. They live on their instincts.

There's two things I gotta do. One is, I gotta update my resume. And then, I have to call my mother.

I wouldn't succeed at musical theater.

Everybody gets the tattoo they deserve.

People always love and respect characters who speak the truth, even if the truth hurts.

I don't know if [Samuel] Beckett is something you ever bring to the beach - get out of the water, towel off, and start reading some of "The Unnamable." Although, because it's the kind of book you can open to any page and start reading, it is beach reading in that way.

Whenever somebody says they need an angle for their story I always fear that they've got an idea and they want me to fit into it or they want me to come up with an idea myself or I'm supposed to be more revealing than I've been, and to me it just sounds like something I don't want to do.

People think celebrities don't have to worry about human things like sickness and death and rent. It's like you've traveled to this Land of Celebrity, this other country. They want you to tell about what you saw.

If you have Darwin, Christ and Nietzsche, they're all going to talk at once. You need somebody who listens.

Larry Grobel's interviews are informative and insightful without being pandering or intrusive. You get the sense at all times of both intelligence at work-the interviewee's and Grobel's-both inspired by the encounter.

I feel I have to work hard to nurture whatever talent I have as an actor. I feel like it's not natural to me. So I don't take it for granted... What I think is my natural ability - which is writing - I think I totally take that for granted.

The real truth about a lot of life's mysteries can be explained by science but people don't want to get in bed with science because it's cold. They prefer religion, myth, drama.

I enjoy trying to figure out the best way to compliment the picture and not overpower it.

There is never a personal-life connection between my characters and myself. I'm a professional and I can access what I need to access, so there's no bleed-over. I didn't need to believe in aliens to play Mulder. As for my personal life, everything is fantastic right now.

My whole life, Ive wanted things before I was ready. I was always pushing for the next job, the next success. I was so focused on achieving and the path that I was missing some great point about life.

Most journalists expect me to answer all their questions about aliens and spaceships.

We like to keep the sexual tension underplayed, especially between the Smoking Man and me. Once we thought he was my father . . . it got more interesting.

I wouldn't say we were doing that. I think we probably stopped thinking. Though it took a while to stop thinking.

A lot of times passion projects or films are difficult to make because they don't have proven directors attached to them.