People would love to be rich, but they're looking for the easy way. Who wouldn't want to win the lottery? Just to score.
Bryan Cranston
Luck is a component that a lot of people in the arts sometimes fail to recognise: that you can have talent, perseverance, patience, but without luck you will not have a successful career.
I learned long ago to focus on things you can control and don't even pay attention to things you don't.
If something is well-written, it has a chance to be good and if it's not well-written, it will not be good. It could even become popular, but it won't be good.
It's funny, I do try to maintain health. I started doing Bikram yoga which is that hothouse yoga, the 105 degrees yoga for 90 minutes. It's great, you purge out all the sweat and you're drinking water.
I don't have spare time.
Love between two adults is always conditional. You can fall out of love because you are able to fall in love.
What's interesting is a man with no facial hair is less intimidating than a man with facial hair, and a man who is bald is more intimidating than a man with hair.
I'm not crazy about being out of control, and I get emotional when things are unclean. When things are out of order. When things are messy. Because I lived in a mess as a child.
I have talked to stunt drivers all my life, 32 years of talking to stunt drivers. There's a craziness to them.
Any kind of civil rights oppression is wrong.
What's great about well-written material is, if you can shock with justifiable actions, that's the best.
I'm pretty handy! I do a lot of things around the house, and I actually enjoy it.
I have a lovely family who supports me and it's great.
In order to be an actor you really have to be one of those types of people who are risk-takers and have what is considered an actor's arrogance, which is not to say an arrogance in your personal life. But you have to be the type of person who wants the ball with seconds left in the game.
Something's happened in our society which I don't think is beneficial, and that's that you see the public being fed box-office news. Newscasts now, every local station - I've been traveling around the country a lot, and you see the local news, and they give box-office reports.
I intend to do more directing TV.
It's mind-altering when you slip into someone else's shoes. That's psychedelic, man.
Money has never been my primary goal.
With craziness, you can't predict it. There's very little defense you can have on craziness.
My goal has always been to be a working actor.
There's so many things that can go wrong in the execution of a project like a television show or a movie, so many little elements, any number of things, all the way to marketing - like they could market it poorly and nobody finds it and down it goes.
The TV business is like the produce section of the market. Today everything is fresh and glistening and firm. And tomorrow, when they find a bruise on you, they toss you out.
I have some anger issues.
I'm telling you, until I shaved my head, I never realized how much heat is lost through the top of the head. I walk out in winter and it feels like I have an ice pack on my head. Unbelievable.
I look like everyone.
I think naturally, if you're an actor, there's a high level of assertiveness that you need to have to survive this business. There's boldness in being assertive, and there's strength and confidence.
What's great about comedy, obviously, is that you set up a situation that people assume one thing and then you break the assumption. That's basically the backbone to comedy. You set up a situation, let people make an assumption, and then you break the assumption.
The imagination is part of the arsenal that actors draw from.
When I was a kid there were a very select few channels - programmes had to have more of a large appeal and they just didn't offer very much. Now you have a situation where the television world has expanded and there's hundreds of channels.
When you're directing an ongoing series, the tone has already been set. So a director will come in and fulfill that tone - reinforce the characters and their behavior. The challenge is to find unique ways that you can visually tell the story while keeping the established tone and the pace and the characters.
You get addicted to emotions. Our endorphins kick in and it's like a high. On the low end you might love roller coasters. On the high end you might be a bank robber or something.
Bad for the sake of bad is boring to me and not believable.
I'm a big fan of 'Mad Men.'
When actors first come up, you're auditioning for everything - you're trying to sniff it out like a pig with a truffle and you would do anything!
I admit, I do a lot of projects, but it's because I'm in a position now where I'm reading a lot more scripts and plays and things, and I'm really listening to offers and trying to think what I want to do at any given time.
You need to tell the truth to the audience, or they will throw a brick through the TV. They'll turn you off.
If you're a person who complains about everything all the time, then you're just the boy who cried 'wolf.' But if you do it on occasion and about the right reasons, then people listen.
If you have a level of expectation in your life that you have to be a quote-unquote star, whatever that means, you might be setting yourself up for failure.
Given the right set of circumstances any one of us could become dangerous - so why not show that in our programmes?
It used to be that people would watch TV shows because they knew the characters would stay the same. Whether it's Archie Bunker or it's Thomas Magnum you watch it because it's like, 'I'm comfortable, this is the same guy.'
Part of an actor's job is to draw up a back story.
I think if you believe in past lives, I must have been an extremely deprived being. I must have been mistreated, beaten, and forced into indentured servitude because this life has just been phenomenal.
I think, and I mean this sincerely, I was raised humbly. We were a lower middle income family and a household that was scrimping by at times. We were watching the dollar, stretching the dollar, and coupons. It was all those things.
My passion is becoming involved in good work, whether that means as an actor or writer or director or producer or all - that is not as important to me.
Being a day player, period, is one of the hardest things you can do as an actor.
I've done more crap than I care to remember. I really have. 'Airwolf.' 'Murder, She Wrote.' 'Amazon Women on the Moon.' But you learn from all these bad shows. What you don't want to do and what you don't want to be involved with.
My personal feeling, if I can interject a political note, is that I don't think it is right that basic health care is a privilege. It shouldn't be. It should be a right of all human beings. And certainly in the richest country in the world.
At my age, I don't think anyone is untouched by cancer.
There's this notion that in order to draw attention and to be considered for roles I want to be considered for, you need a certain amount of notoriety.
