Rainn Wilson Quotes

My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet.

I think we're the only jokeless show on television. I mean really, we have no setups and no punch lines. It's not a joke show. There are funny lines and funny moments but again the comedy is born of the human experience and awkward pauses are a great part of what it is to be human.

What's interesting is the show allows for the awkward pauses to be captured, which makes it stylistically unique, especially for American audiences.

(In) most cop shows, every cop in the squad speaks exactly the same and the same kind of short clipped film noir-ish talk.

This is one doodle that can't be un-did, Homeskillet.

I was doing great plays. It wasn't changing the world. I was getting good agents and doing film and TV and I wasn't happier. I was like "Wow, there is an unease inside of me." And that led me back on my kind of more spiritual path to the Baha'i faith in a new and fresher way and I came to also understand at that point that there was no difference between being devout and being an artist. There is no difference between creativity and spirituality and philosophy and that is what Soul Pancake, the book, and SoulPancake.com are about is: it's all about human expression and it's about seeking to transcend.

I started in theatre, and for me, it was all about transformation. You transform into the character that you're playing.

I know what I look like - a weird, sad clown puppet. I'm fine with that.

I was this weird misfit guy from suburban Seattle, I never really fit in, and then I became a drama geek, among all the other different kinds of geek that I was growing up, and I found I was pretty good at it.

I think it needs to be with a heart-based wisdom and this heart-based wisdom needs to go hand in hand with science and with social activism and love for our planet and love for our whole human family that spans the whole globe and this may sound very high and mighty or airy-fairy, but it's going to have to go to that or else we're just all going to destroy each other.

We live in a really racist culture and it's got to be addressed.

My mom was an actress in the local Seattle theater doing experimental plays.

I like being a Baha'i who has an out-there sense of humor. God gives us talents and faculties, and making people laugh is one of mine.

I'm lucky to have a wife and a child that keep me grounded.

I definitely have been known to be grossly insensitive in many different ways, you can ask the wife. To speak without a filter sometimes and not being able to edit myself with much sensitivity.

I like playing misfits, I like playing oddballs, I like playing characters with rough edges.

People are flawed. I like peaking into their flaws. The way to humanize them is not to play them in any general way, but to make them very specific. If you make them specific, they have hopes and dreams and loves and vulnerabilities and quirks and you get to know them and you get to appreciate them.

I think that doing comedy and playing Dwight is a service. Not to get grandiose about it, but I have a talent for playing oddball characters and I can make people laugh and that can help bring families together and people will really enjoy it and it puts a smile on their face and I think that is a really great thing.

I think Dwight loves being number two. I don't think he has any desire to be number one. He wants to be number two no matter where he goes. It's like Avis. 'We try harder.' That's Dwight.

Well, Dwight was born to be No. 2 and I don't think he would know what to do as a leader. But he loves following. He would have made a great fascist.

The great thing about 'The Office' and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.

We've seen that there are a lot of people out there - teenagers in Topeka, housewives in Long Island, millionaire Internet start-up moguls - that all want to connect with each other about what it is to be human.

I play Dwight. That is just much me being of service and worshiping as if I'm on my knees in some temple somewhere or bowing my head in prayer to God in some way. It's really all just the same thing.

I think God has a tremendous sense of humor.

I can relate to someone whose life is falling apart, and they are doing the best to get by, using humor to survive. Backstrom really wears his heart on his sleeve and his life is unraveling... I would much rather hang out with that person than a slick procedural detective who has all the answers... it's human, it's frail, it's interesting.

I think that actors are terrible communicators as people by and large. I think our tendency is to kind of be self-centered and tune people out and just kind of get really me-focused, so I think communication for actors is a big challenge actually.

When I was a little kid I loved the Marx brothers and discovered Monty Python when I was 10 or 11-years-old. I used to take a tape recorder and hold it up in front of the TV to record entire episodes to play over and over again, so that I could memorise it.

I was a total dork in high school.

I use two million Twitter followers as a tool. The reason I have Twitter is so people can get to know me as a different person other than Dwight. I just realized all of the sudden like everything thinks I'm Dwight. They think that I'm Dwight from the office and that I'm this kind of annoying, difficult, nerdy, creepy guy and they don't know Rainn Wilson - although I'm a little bit nerdy, annoying and creepy. I'm not as much as Dwight Schrute.

I'm about as big a star as the Baha'i faith has got, which is pretty pathetic.

Some of the most morally conscious, kindest, most compassionate people are in the entertainment industry, people who want to affect the world and make it a better place through telling human, heartfelt stories.

When I grew up in Seattle, by the way, in the 70's, it was a fishing village. There were loggers and fishers and my dad had a sewer company and it wasn't the way Seattle is now. Culturally, it was very different back then.

I think creative blocks come from people's life journeys. If you don't know who you are or what you're about or what you believe in it's really pretty impossible to be creative.

Dwight is a sad clown. You've seen those paintings of sad clown.

I think that charity is a tricky thing, because a lot of times, people equate charity with handouts. I don't believe in handouts.

We live in a really sexist culture, that's got to be addressed. And a really homophobic one. And all those things need to be addressed and looked at.

And I want to find a way to be of service to humanity. I think that's crucial. So want to be an artist and a servant, a humanitarian, and I want to play goofy weirdoes.

Not everything is a lesson. Sometimes you just fail.

I want to keel over on stage playing King Lear at age 99 or something like that.

I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books.

I've always been terrible on regular sitcoms with lots of jokes. I don't know how to tell jokes.

The camera adds ten pounds and ten thousand dollars.

I have an eight-year-old child, and I literally can't wrap my mind around the kind of grief that must be felt when you lose a child.

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

I love being an actor, and I don't want to be a spokesman for anything, I don't want to do anything crazy or fancy like that. I just love playing characters and getting paid for it, and that's what I want to do till the day I die.

I joined an acting class in my junior year in high school. I'd always wanted to try it.

Absolutely father knows best, always do what your fathers say, and if you can't find one then just ask me, I am a father and I know best.

I am all for controlling guns.