Kevin Spacey Quotes

I'm supposed to convince you, for two hours, that I'm somebody else. Now if you know everything about my life, if you think you've got me figured out and you think you know all my dark secrets, how am I ever going to convince you that I'm somebody else?

I was not a studious kid, and I struggled to find things that would command my attention and engage my ideas and energies.

Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.

If you look back through history in the United States, there have been very few landslide elections. Half the country always voted for someone else.

I liked it because it was such a dangerous script and showed just what human beings are capable of. Here was a movie in which Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, who always win in every movie they ever do, simply don't win. I felt that was outrageous for a commercial movie.

I'm lucky if I find one movie a year that's worth doing, and when I do find one, it usually only takes 20-30 days to shoot.

I am now a commander of the British Empire.

Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get.

I'm not out there trying to get press for myself nor am I trying to convince anybody that I'm living any kind of a life. I'm actually trying to convince people: I don't want you to know what I'm living, because it's none of your business.

I never wanted to go to the Old Vic and not have it survive long after I was gone. It's not about me; it's about that theater. And the more that it's able to grow and do everything it should do without me, then I've done my job.

It's always the big question in our lives if you have a lot of success. What do you do with it? Buy more houses, buy more cars, buy more stuff, be wealthy and distant and unengaged? Or do you take all that good fortune that has come towards you and spread the love, do something with it?

I feel it's a responsibility for anyone who breaks through a certain ceiling... to send the elevator back down and give others a helpful lift.

While the sciences are hugely important, let us not leave behind a child's imagination.

I'm able to hang up the character with the costume at the end of the movie.

Essentially, your voice is an instrument; it's a muscle, and you have to treat it like a muscle, and so you have to work it.

Sometimes it's the crazy people who turn out to be not so crazy.

I guess I've been training in the theater for as long as I can remember.

It's a really wonderful thing to focus your life on something other than your own personal career and ambition.

If you wanna compete, you've got to get into the original content game.

There are good people in the lobbying industry. Lobbyists can serve a very useful purpose.

Partisan rancour and party politics and ideology have got in the way of compromise - and compromise is the only thing that has ever made politics successful.

You learn every single day when you're running a company. You learn as you go.

I don't play villainy. I wouldn't even know how to play it.

I've always found it strange that a director can hire any designer he wants from any country. But if he hires a foreign actor, it's like he's stolen the crown jewels and run across the river with them.

Exposure to the arts and culture is enormously valuable.

People say, 'If you open a movie online at the same time as in movie theatres, no one is going to go to the movies.' That's just not true. People love to go out and have a shared experience; they always will.

I remember meeting the likes of Johnny Carson and Jimmy Stewart for the first time and being completely starstruck.

Sometimes the person who is the most logical is the person whom we call insane.

I'll tell you one thing. I've never heard a director saying that the dailies suck.

Over a spell of about three years, I played a series of roles that were, for me, all very different, but most of them came out within a six-month period. They all dealt with a kind of dark territory that in some cases had been mined before in movies.

I'm not going to make general comments about the British press.

I don't live a lie. You have to understand that people who choose not to discuss their personal lives are not living a lie. That is a presumption that people jump to.

I have wanted to have children. I do want to have children.

There's nothing like standing in a place and wanting nothing so much as to change but simply not being able to.

London is a very energising place to be.

I'm attracted to things that are challenging and fun and interesting, and it certainly seems that audiences enjoy them as well.

I terribly miss - we all miss, I think - somebody like the great producer Irving Thalberg. He had a foot in both camps: He understood us creative people. And he understood the money people.

Cable TV has become where the best actors, writers and directors have gone to work because they are allowed to do character-driven stories.

When you study, as I did, every theatrical beginning in this country, none of them have been greeted well. The Royal Shakespeare Company was a disaster, Peter Hall was a disaster, Richard Eyre was a disaster, Trevor Nunn was always a disaster.

I don't watch rugby.

I don't categorize characters into one syllable. These are fully-rounded characters that I don't judge; I just play them.

I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.

When I was young, I learned very early on that I could make my mother laugh. And that was one of the greatest sounds I ever heard.

As long as we, in the United States, continue to insist that our politicians have to spend all of their time raising millions of dollars for television ads, it will be corrupt. If we leave it up to the politicians to clean up lobbying and finance reform, nothing is going to change.

You can almost hear people saying, 'We're going to make a movie about an election' and 'We're going to make a movie about a lobbyist.' You can hear the yawning start across the nation.

For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.

I have never played a game in my life.

What hasn't surprised me is that audiences, as we found starting with box sets, want control, to decide how they watch it. Appointment viewing is slowly being put slightly behind.

No one's personal life is in the public interest. It's gossip, bottom line. End of story.

I find it sad that by not talking about who I sleep with, that makes me mysterious. There was a time when I would have been called a gentleman.