Zachary Quinto Quotes

There's nothing so freeing as going to rehearsal and having that experience.

We did monologues and scenes, and New York I did a scene from Amadeus and a monologue from Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead by Eric Bogosian, and then in L.A. I switched the scene to This is Our Youth and did the same monologue. I was spiky-haired, super skinny. A lot of people were like, "You should come here and do a sitcom." That was the feedback that I got. Obviously it was quite a different journey than the one I've actually had, but I just listened to people.

I would say auditioning was my real training ground. The technical aspects - like hitting marks and pacing yourself and preparing and dealing with the downtime - the first recurring role I had on 24 was probably the way I learned that stuff.

I also feel like the kinds of jobs I want right now - I consider them aspirational. I want to raise the bar for myself, and I am in this interesting spot where I do get offered a lot of things, but frankly, the majority of the things I get offered I'm not really interested in doing. I want to do the things that I have to fight for.

I find that communication as an actor and person is an important part of who I am. And I'm really drawn into the psychology of those dynamics.

I recognized that I had a window of opportunity that had opened because of my exposure as an actor.

In light of Jamey [Rodemeyer]'s death -- it became clear to me in an instant that living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it -- is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality.

It feels that way when I'm doing a play, absolutely. On film and television, it's more complicated than that I think, and when you start to add the business into the mix, and the industry into the mix, it doesn't maintain it's purity. That's something that's inevitable and unavoidable, but that's why I try to do plays as much as I possibly can.

I found myself in a pattern of being attracted to people who were somehow unavailable, and what I realized was that I was protecting myself because I equate the idea of connection and love with trauma and death.

Heroes and Star Trek were 2006 and 2007, and I was just about to turn 30, and everything changed. I found myself on this amazing journey, which continues, but it's now at a natural transition point. I'm reevaluating and reexamining how and where I go from here.

I knew I needed a partner. I needed someone who could focus on and spearhead the business side of things, and [Neal Dodson] was great at that. That's how it started.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

There was a little bit of hesitancy about staying in Pittsburgh and not moving away for college, but that didn't last long. It was right in line with what I wanted, so I auditioned there and it wasn't a tough decision.

I was aware of it but I think I was aware of it abstractly, theoretically. You know I understood who Edward Snowden was and what he did but I didn't really see the relevance that it bore in my life and doing film changed that tune pretty quick.

My passion is acting, and has always been. It's what brought me to this point of being able to diversify and do other things, and I hope it's something I'll continue to have a passion for.

[Edward Snowden and his team] they're great characters. They're fascinating people. They were in an extraordinary situation.

I listen to music a lot, if I need to get into a particular space. I do stretching and breathing, and take time to mostly be quiet and find the stillness. I think that's important.

Our society needs to recognize the unstoppable momentum toward unequivocal civil equality for every gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered citizen of this country.

I met Glenn [ Greenwald] briefly in 2009. We were both guests on Real Time With Bill Maher. I was the show's guest and he was on the panel. But this was before the Snowden stuff happened. I didn't have the opportunity to meet him in preparation for the movie, unfortunately, for various reasons. But I was able to dive into the main articles he's written, and interviews with him, and just the function that the character serves in the movie, that was enough for me.

I remember [Patrick J. Adams] being in a particularly disillusioned place and really wanting your ambitions to be met with opportunity and not feeling like they were. It's all the more reason that I feel grateful to be able to stay connected and be in each other's lives. Obviously now you're in a very different place, and it's really nice to be able to look back on that and be reminded of how far we've come, at least in the opportunity aspect. The mental state aspect of it is a different story, I'm sure, but I always knew you would work.

My relationship with Leonard [Nimoy] was a byproduct of playing Spock that I never would have imagined, but the more I got to know him, the more I realized, there are no mistakes. I'm playing this role for very specific reasons, and maybe those reasons have to do with where I am creatively in my life, but maybe they have to do with where I am personally in my life. Leonard was such a teacher for me.

My first job was a show called The Others. I had, like, three lines. Julianne Nicholson was in it, and Gabriel [Macht]. I remember Gabriel wasn't there the day I was, but he sent a note, because he went to Carnegie Mellon as well, so we knew each other a little bit through that, and he was so sweet and generous. It was meant to be a recurring role that would evolve on the show, but the show only lasted a little while and I ended up only doing that one episode.

I love supporting emerging voices, and new writers and directors. I love engaging an audience in a way that doesn't have to involve me, personally, and yet still generates an experience for groups of people.

I love playing characters that go to extreme places, and I love to explore different kinds of psychological landscapes, so it is ultimately a kind of fun, but it's also complicated and colored by the depth of the nastiness of it, at certain times, as well.

I changed all my passwords. I have no any two passwords that are the same for any service online. I have two-step verification enabled on all my devices...so yeah, I did take some extra steps that I hadn't taken before being exposed to this world.

The situation they [journalists and Edward Snowden] were in was incredibly heightened. The stakes were high. There was a lot of pressure, a lot of tension, a lot of sense of claustrophobic, clandestine energy that I think was exhilarating for us to explore and recreate. We were fortunate to shoot a fair amount of our stuff at the actual hotel where it all happened in Hong Kong. That added another element of very similitude to the situation, so I feel like it was exciting.

While we were shooting the movie, we shot in the actual hotel in Hong Kong where it all went down, the Mira Hotel. Laura Poitras was coming to Hong Kong to do a screening of Citizenfour, and she ended up staying at the Mira Hotel. It was her first time back in Hong Kong, and I ran into her in the elevator. Literally I had just finished shooting one day, and I came back to the hotel and she was in the elevator.

People always ask me what I think, if Edward Snoden is a hero, if he's a villain. I don't really tend to moralize it so much as I feel like he's a whistleblower. He's someone who saw a wrongdoing and in order to shine a light on that wrongdoing had to bend some rules and break some laws along the way.

It was actually pretty cool to be in Pittsburgh for those four years. I moved into the dorms and had a pretty normal college experience, even though it was in my hometown. I really thrived there. I feel like it really suited me and served me well in terms of how I grew up there.

Zoe Saldana is such an angel. She’s got such an openness and vulnerability on camera and yet such great strength. She can kick ass with the best of them, but then she can soften and open up in a way that is magnetizing whether you’re watching her on set or on screen – she’s got a real power to her. I love her; we’ve known each other for years and it’s great to come back to that kind of familiarity, especially when you’re working with such intimacy.

Honestly, people told me to. It was weird, I graduated from school, I never thought I'd live in L.A. and I always wanted to be to New York. I assumed that would be my trajectory - that romantic ideal of moving there and doing plays Off-Broadway and being scrappy about it. Then we did a showcase in New York and a showcase in L.A., and for whatever reason the response that I generated in L.A. was significantly more enthusiastic.

I want to be working with directors who are at the top of their game. I want to be raising the bar for myself, and to me, the best way to do that is to prove to them that I'm the best for this job.

We're living in an increasingly nationalistic, xenophobic time, and you can see it reflected in societies all over the world.

We just have to have visibility. We have to have acknowledgement. We have to have accountability to how we treat one another.

I would love to be a voice in this maelstrom of chaos and obsessive celebrity infatuation that says, 'Let's talk about something that matters'.

It's a very complicated landscape and I don't think there's one easy answer about it [Edard Snowden movie].

Other actors are not my concern, and that's their life and that's their journey. Everybody has to get to a point in their own time and their own way.

I only auditioned at four schools. I started performing and studying when I was in middle school, and then as I got into high school, it just got more serious. I feel like it became more of a vocation. It became clear to me at that point that I wanted to pursue it.

I think we're a little bit more astray, more far afield from true integration and true acceptance.

They're mounting a campaign right now with the ACLU and a lot of different organizations advocating for [Edward Snoden] pardoning before [Barack] Obama leaves office. Wouldn't it be incredible to see something like that happen? I don't know what we can expect. I am interested in the different points and perspectives that people have.

I don't really approach a character as to whether or not it's good or bad. I just approach a character as to where it lives in me.

But when I found out that Jamey Rodemeyer had made an It Gets Better video only months before taking his own life, I felt indescribable despair.

We [with Neal Dodson and Corey Moosa] were constantly looking for features and looking for ways to get involved with people who were making stuff.

J.C. [Chandor] was the kind of energy we were looking for, so we decided to get behind it with all of our effort. That was the beginning of our relationship with first-time feature directors, and that's when it became really important to us, watching them thrive and grow in a creative environment in which you can do that was really key. Also his work checked all the boxes, because it was socially relevant and intellectually driven, and creatively exciting.

I was definitely an extroverted personality at a young age and theater was an outlet for me to channel that energy.

I like dreams. I think there's a lot of information in them. I spent a lot of time on Jungian analysis and dreams are an elemental part of that process. Carl Jung believed very much in the power archetypes in dreams, what dream imagery means, and how you can tie it into deeper self examination. It's a big part of the therapeutic process.

I remember having to hit a mark and having no idea how to do it, real childlike stuff, because Carnegie Mellon didn't do an extensive job preparing us for film and television. It was very much a theater program. That was my first job. It was cool. I was glad it was.

I loved auditioning because it was just an opportunity to act. Whether or not I got the job was the next hurdle, but the idea that I would get to act that day was the thing that excited me the most about it.