You have to remember that for more than half my life - probably until my children were born - acting was everything to me. I was obsessed by it, and I spent so much time just trying to get to the point where I was being paid to do it. Literally, I spent every waking moment thinking about acting.

Mark Ruffalo

Time Mom Men

If you're not yelling at your kids, then you're not spending enough time with them!

Mark Ruffalo

Time Your You

Also, stick around. Don't lose your heart, just keep going, keep at it.

Mark Ruffalo

Art Your You

I think of marriage as a garden. You have to tend to it. Respect it, take care of it, feed it. Make sure everyone is getting the right amount of, um, sunlight.

Mark Ruffalo

Respect Marriage Car

Certainly, it's very easy to fall in love with cash. If you're going to make all your decisions based on cash, you're going to have a pretty naffy career.

Mark Ruffalo

Love Car Your

It's a difficult undertaking. I've been married for four years and I see this movie as a cautionary tale about people who've gone deeply out of communication.

Mark Ruffalo

Communication Years Year

The true value of somebody in this town is very hard to determine. It's all smoke and mirrors.

Mark Ruffalo

Very Value True

I'm like a Depression-era person as far as acting goes. It's sort of like, grab it while you can and make the most of what's in front of you. The first 'Avengers' opened up a host of things that I've been struggling to get made for a long period of time.

Mark Ruffalo

Time You While

My personal belief is that you carry your own water in a relationship. If you see a girl and you think she's hot, that's a very human reaction, but you don't go and tell your spouse that, you know? So in one way it's how you behave.

Mark Ruffalo

Relationship Car Your

I was an introverted kid; I liked my time alone. And the rest of my family is pretty extroverted, so I felt like a bit of an oddball. They're very gregarious and charming and charismatic people. I always felt like I was struggling as a young person. I think everyone was very surprised to hear that I wanted to be an actor.

Mark Ruffalo

Time Family Alone

Sometimes, as an actor, you're so deeply immersed in a part that you lose control of it. If you're really lucky, a few times in your life it'll take you somewhere you never expected to go. It really blows the top off your understanding of your craft.

Mark Ruffalo

Time Life Art

I became an actor so I didn't have to be myself.

Mark Ruffalo

T Self Myself

My mom was a hairdresser. My aunt was a hairdresser. My brother was a hairdresser. My sisters are hairdressers.

Mark Ruffalo

Mom UN T

I didn't apply to any colleges - I lied to all my friends and told them I was going to UCSD, because all their parents would be like, 'Mark, where're you going to college?' and I'd just lie 'cause I felt it was unrealistic to be an actor.

Mark Ruffalo

You Would Where

I did grow up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, around a lot of my mom's family. I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me, and my sisters and my brother. Probably the most formative part of it was that we grew up on the edge of a forest. It wasn't a big forest, but it was enough. When you're a kid, it feels gigantic.

Mark Ruffalo

Mom Family Art

I think where people get into trouble is hiding and feeling ashamed about what they don't have any control over in the first place.

Mark Ruffalo

Where Trouble Think

I have a very dear family and very dear friends. They're my rock. These are people who knew me from the beginning, you know, as a loser in a 1972 Dodge Dart with the bumper literally duct-taped to the body.

Mark Ruffalo

Family Art You

You have to remember that for more than half my life - probably until my children were born - acting was everything to me. I was obsessed by it, and I spent so much time just trying to get to the point where I was being paid to do it. Literally, I spent every waking moment thinking about acting.

Mark Ruffalo

Time Mom Men

My belief about acting in one foot on a banana peel and the other one in the grave.

Mark Ruffalo

Tin T Peel

Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.

Mark Ruffalo

Great Year Turning

I was bartending for a long time and going on auditions and was constantly being rebuffed.

Mark Ruffalo

Time Art Tim

I like to disappear in the parts I play.

Mark Ruffalo

I have mental illness in my family. I have a lot of compassion for those people.

Mark Ruffalo

I had to work on a Marlin boat, like gutting fish, like as the bait boy.

Mark Ruffalo

As we're bombarded with the imagery that we are and now, post 9-11, it's hard not to get hardened by the world and the amount of violence that's allowed to be shown to kids these days.

Mark Ruffalo

My surfboard is a 7-foot-3-inch spoon made by Rip Curl, kind of between a longboard and a shortboard. Surfing brings me into the here and now. It's a dance with the present.

Mark Ruffalo

People say funny things all the time during really serious moments in life.

Mark Ruffalo

The problem to me is violence. It's not cool to kill somebody or hurt people.

Mark Ruffalo

Every piece of geopolitical strife that's happening in the world today is revolved around energy, either trying to grab resources or people using resources to fund radical groups.

Mark Ruffalo

When I left my Catholic school, I was around 10 or 11 years old, and it started to unravel for me there. Kids pick up on things if you're interested and inquisitive. I was seeing things that were not in line with what I'd been taught about Jesus. It didn't jive with me.

Mark Ruffalo

The sculptor Frosty Myers and I met when we were bidding against each other at an auction. He's an eccentric, a liberal with a collection of rifles, and his stuff is big art. We share a love of tractors. I'm trading him one for a piece of art.

Mark Ruffalo

We're warriors, this culture, and we're very puritanical about sex and very embracing about violence and I don't know why that is.

Mark Ruffalo

I still feel like I'm trying to make it. It's hard to shed the struggling actor thing.

Mark Ruffalo

I did a series of these soft-core horror movies called 'Mirror Mirror.' I got killed in 'em all - and each time, I came back as a different character. They were all straight-to-video.

Mark Ruffalo

I love 'The Sportswriter' by Richard Ford. Ford really captures for me the bittersweetness of the quietly suffering American man. It's stoic, sad, and really beautiful.

Mark Ruffalo

I ran to my marriage, I was happily ready to take on marriage.

Mark Ruffalo

Actors, like it or not, their voices carry deeply into the culture: people look towards them for attitudes, for right or wrong, and today, the mainstream media doesn't really balance the unheard.

Mark Ruffalo

The laws of nature tell us there's a finite amount of any substance on the face of the earth, and at some point, that's going to run out. And if we're smart and we have some grace and we have some willingness about our destiny, then we will take ourselves into the renewable world.

Mark Ruffalo

With social media, you have this new kind of way to communicate with people that's very immediate, sometimes alarmingly so, sometimes painfully so. If you could just hold some objectivity, a very direct, unfiltered, raw reflection of the way something is landing in the culture without any spin, or filtration, or anything, it's very raw.

Mark Ruffalo

I remember riding my bike down the boardwalk with nowhere to go and looking at the girls. It was really innocent.

Mark Ruffalo

The fracking chemicals sit in open pits, get trucked around, or sent through pipelines that can burst. What do you think happens when frack chemicals and floods and storm swollen rivers mix?

Mark Ruffalo

My real baby is renewable energy. I feel like whoever starts to crack this nut is going to have a pretty clear shot at the White House. It's a $2 trillion business that America's being left out of.

Mark Ruffalo

For the longest time, I was Scott Ruffalo's brother. I mean, he was the mayor of Beverly Hills. He was just so beloved there.

Mark Ruffalo

It's imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame.

Mark Ruffalo

I'm a very hands-on father. I like being a hands-on father. I am probably more like one of my kids in my family, but the dominating kid.

Mark Ruffalo

People use the Method as a shield; it shields them from being vulnerable. I hear all these young actors who are like, 'I'm Method, I'm gonna go live in the house, you know, I totally get it, I've done it, I've been there', but one thing I know is it kills spontaneity.

Mark Ruffalo

I'd never taken a job purely for money - I felt that would kill me - but I was afraid that I was heading that way. Then, my brother passing away was the final thing that kicked me over. It reminded me that life is short, and you'd better do what you want while you have a chance.

Mark Ruffalo

Literally, I think I've quit acting three or four times, only for a few days. Maybe for a few weeks.

Mark Ruffalo

I enjoyed growing up part of my life in Virginia Beach. We had the ocean and the beach and a beautiful landscape. We were outdoors all the time and we played outside.

Mark Ruffalo

I do readings at the public library. I just did a benefit scene night for my old acting teacher.

Mark Ruffalo

After the brain tumor happened, I realized I love acting, I've always loved it, I may never get a chance to do it again.

Mark Ruffalo