Kevin Spacey Quotes

You have to always be ready, always be alive, and always be willing to move in a new direction.

If you have done well in whatever business you are in, it is your duty to send the elevator back down and try to help bring up the next generation of undiscovered talent.

I certainly identify with the role of mentor and, to some degree, maybe teacher. I do a lot of work with kids at the Old Vic.

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.

As a producer or financier, you are going to go where you get the best bang for your buck.

Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get.

Meeting the person you are going to be playing is very unique.

I want to bring theatre to a new generation, using the tools available to us, including taking it out to them on film and with new technology, but that is just so they can discover theatre. I want them to come in and sit in a theatre. This is the way to plant seeds.

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

In film, movies schedules are based on three things: actors availabilities, when are sets being built, when you can rent the place youre going to film in.

Its a really wonderful thing to focus your life on something other than your own personal career and ambition.

I can imagine there is going to come a time when someone will do 13 hours of a story without breaks.

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.

Netflix did it right and focused on all the things that have replaced the dumb, raw numbers of the Nielsen world - they embraced targeted marketing and 'brand' as a virtue higher than ratings.

Theatre is organic, film is not. Theatre you come every day and you work with a group of people and you're are all up for it and you all get to do the whole thing every night, be it two hours or three hours. In film you work in two or three minute bits and it's never in chronological order and then someone takes that away and makes it look like it all happened, or that you gave that performance.

I dont play villainy. I wouldnt even know how to play it.

Whether its Veep or Homeland or The West Wing - which is a more idealised version of democracy - people are fascinated by politics.

There's something really incredible about watching what someone else does with a role that we know: the Hamlets or the Henry Vs or the Othellos or the Cleopatras that we've seen on stage.

Its extremely dangerous to compare anyone else to Shakespeare.

There's something very interesting about the way each individual actor approaches stuff.

Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.

Look, I might have lived in England for the last several years but I'm still an American citizen and I have not given up my right to privacy.

The story is everything, which means it's our job to tell better stories.

I am not an image. I am a human being.

Theres nothing like standing in a place and wanting nothing so much as to change but simply not being able to.

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

I went through a period of great rebellion within my family, when I was about 9 or 10. I was mad, I had no focus, had no real interest in anything, and so I started to do things that were just rebellious and stupid.

Anytime someone can beat the acting out of someone else, I think its a wonderful thing.

I think you need the failures to get the success. You learn more from that.

People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.

But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.

Talent is only interesting if it's challenged.

If youre not concerned about maintaining an image, you can pursue roads that another actor might not take.

We're all victims of our own hubris at times.

I like being able to go to a local pub and have great food and particularly love pubs that welcome my dogs.

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."

The legal profession, politics and acting are very closely tied: the whole point is to have an idea and get it across to a listener, whether it is one person or five thousand in a hall.

I never doubted at all. If you ever doubt then you are in trouble. I never thought: 'I should do this or that in case I don't make it.' I never had a back-up plan.

I'm lucky if I find one movie a year that's worth doing, and when I do find one, it usually only takes 20-30 days to shoot.

[Washington, DC] feels like you're watching performance art. A lot of the time. I don't believe them, I don't believe what they say, I don't think they're being absolutely sincere. I think it's performance art. And most of them are bad actors.

I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.

Storytelling helps us understand each other, translate the issues of our times, and the tools of theater and film can be powerful in helping young people to develop communication/collaboration skills, let alone improving their own confidence.

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..

People sometimes say, "Isn't it boring, isn't it always the same? It's the same lines." I go, "Well, do you play tennis? Because that's the best analogy I can give." If you go out eight times and play tennis eight times this week, yeah it's the same rules but it's a different game every time you're out on that court.And that's the best analogy I can come up with the theater.

It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way.

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

Nature's message is clear: we can't keep doing what we're doing now.

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.