Mandy Patinkin Quotes

In my prayers every day, which are a combination of Hebrew prayers and Shakespeare and Sondheim lyrics and things people have said to me that I've written down and shoved in my pocket, I also say the name of every person I've ever known who's passed on.

I love my work, I love the people I work with, I do the best I can.

Peace in the Middle East isn't going to be created by another war or violent act on the other side.

There two other areas that are personally deeply important to me, that I hope the Homeland show can attend to in some way - one, being the refugee crisis. These are the most vulnerable people among us in the world. There are over 60 million refugees displaced by war, over 21 million that go to a third country. The numbers are climbing, and there are no legal options for these people. These are the victims of the real world's crises that the Homeland world reflects on, and almost takes a Polaroid of these days, versus a fictional tale of it.

My sense of religion is Einstein's sense of relativity. I don't believe in God. I believe that energy never dies. So the possibility exists that you might be breathing in some other form of Moses or Buddha or Muhammad or Bobby Kennedy or Roosevelt or Martin Luther King or Jesus.

The best work I can do is to take myself as much as I can out of it and get it as simple as I can.

I can't believe this, I'm arguing with a woman!

Movies were a struggle for me - they didn't come easy.

I got married because I wanted to do something that was more than I understood, because my feelings were more than I understood.

I'm an obsessive hiker and I do it every day for two hours and it really helps me when it comes to learning songs or scripts.

I don't want people to sit and process the song. I want them to just let them bathe over them.

I grew up in Synagogue in the boys' choir. We didn't listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir.

Everyone's entitled to their own experience.

Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.

I have no problem with violence, I have no problem playing horrible people.

I've been very blessed in my personal life and in my career and I have never been ungrateful for what I have.

I desperately want to see the day today and do the best I can not miss a shred of sunlight. It'll be over before I know it.

I feel the most alive when I'm singing. I also get to be the mail man for some of the most beautiful lyrics ever written.

One of the greatest gifts that 'Homeland' has given me is it's affirming on a daily basis.

I would go to war with words, not weapons. I would die talking before I lifted a weapon.

If we can't keep our Palestinian neighbors and Muslim neighbors alive with good water and fresh air, we'll never get them to the peace table.

Making Homeland series is not improvisational comedy theater, but it is improvisation. We might get a call that morning, while we're doing something, and the change goes in that is something that just happened an hour ago, in the world.

I'm blessed. I have a 13-year-old girl's eye and a 14 year-old boy's eye. I've been given the gift of sight by people who decided to donate organs. I try to do as much organ-donor work as I can.

I moved to New York to go to Julliard Drama School. Didn't sing a single note of music.

I'm active in PAX, which is a gun awareness organization. We treat gun safety as a public health issue.

I want to protect everyone in the world, and I believe the way to protect them is to stop the killing universally. Create opportunity and better systems of living and existing, quality of life to humanity all over the world.

There's not a lot of money in revenge.

I'm just an actor. I am nothing special.

People on both sides of any conflict believe they are right, whether it's on a TV show or in the real world.

Everything I am came from my parents. I don't take that much credit for who I am and what I am.

The great love of my life is music.

All great men usually are awakened by the great women in their lives. No matter what friction is there, if that relationship was there, that usually is their best friend, at the end of the day.

Actually, the language in Shakespeare is wonderfully musical. You need to hear the music to connect with the words.

If you stand too close to a painting - all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.

If you told me I could only do one thing, I would choose live concerts.

But I loved the theatre and I was just doing theatre 24/7 and kept dropping courses because I didn't have the time and the chancellor thought that wasn't a good idea after awhile.

I think it's fair to say I'm attracted to playing characters who are rather intense.

Our actions are the ground we walk on.

Now get in the cartoonishly evil vehicle and drive!

I'm lyrically driven, I'm not musically driven.

My wife will tell you that if you feel my hands before I walk on for a performance, you could chill a bottle of wine.

You rarely pay the rent by doing Shakespeare or Ibsen.

So I'm truly an actor who sings, and not a singer who acts.

I try to get that across in the work, to try to, if I'm lucky, to make this world a little bit better for all of us before I check out. And that's if I'm lucky, I don't always get to have that privilege but I try always.

If you're sick, watch funny movies.

Arthur Miller said one of my favorite lines ever, that he had the mother say to her two sons about a very unstable father in Death of a Salesman. She said, "Attention must be paid." It's one of the most resonant lines that I think he ever wrote, and I think attention must be paid to the truth.

The time it takes to get something done is the time it takes.

No one is going to beat the crap out of me more than me.