Casey Affleck Quotes

In my movies, there has been little to do in the way of animal rights. I have never worked in a movie with animals. No horse-riding, no trained dogs, lions, bears. A few actors, but what could I do? We had to have them.

Most of my acting jobs have resulted in a series of mortifying revelations spread over years and years following the shoot.

But when I start to kiss someone – lust is the easiest emotion to generate.

My mom has a good way of engaging me in a conversation about the choices I make, listening, being objective and open-minded, and respecting those choices so long as they don’t put me in danger.

After I left LA… it was like waking up. And so I moved back east and stopped auditioning.

I have a very bad relationship with mice.

My aim was not to fool. My aim was to provoke thought and stir emotion.

When a performance isn’t working, it’s usually because the actor is trying to do something and they’re not able to express their idea very well. It’s a muddled expression.

All cultures are different. Some commit genocide. Some are uniquely peaceful. Some frequent bathhouses in groups. Some don’t show each other the soles of their shoes or like pictures taken of them. Some have enormous hunting festivals or annual stretches when nobody speaks. Some don’t use electricity.

The four movies I can remember seeing as a kid were ‘The Elephant Man,’ ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ and ‘Mad Max!’ Two of those are westerns. So the western genre is emblazoned on my memory from childhood, and those are two great movies.

I’d like to never be able to get pigeonholed, which is difficult to do.

I feel like there’s an obligation – this sounds terribly pretentious – if you’re an artist, to share your own experience in a way that’s truthful and honest: ‘This is what I have to share; this is my life.’

I do think people do pick movies that reveal something about them that they aren’t always aware of. If you ask them what kind of an actor they think they are, they’ll probably tell you something different than what they’ve actually done.

The way people appear in the gossip papers, as they’re depicted as celebrities, it’s not often much like who they are. The more people I meet, the more that’s true. Sometimes, they’re worse.

I’ve chosen the parts that have interested me and parts that I thought I could do a job with but also were challenging and a little bit scary.

Some people go to their job. That’s the job they have; they have to do it. They hate their boss and their coworkers, this and that. It’s hard to get along.

Things are never crystal clear, but at some point, they reveal themselves to you. You just hope it happens when you’re still on set.

Lots of movies don’t kind of work as well as they do on the page.

I live in New York full time. I can’t live in L.A., because I fear people think I’m a vagrant there. If you show up in L.A. with your shirt inside out or socks mismatched, people start putting change in your cup.

I believe that any kind of mistreatment of anyone for any reason is unacceptable and abhorrent, and everyone deserves to be treated with respect in the workplace and anywhere else.

I’ve written some love letters in my life, I can say.

Why can’t people just say they were moved? Why do they have to say it’s sappy?

I think there’s a certain amount of pressure depending on how demanding the part is, depending on how great the material is. I feel a certain amount of pressure to rise to the occasion.

In New York, as long as you’re not peeing in someone’s doorway, everyone thinks you’re a gentleman. I feel like my behavior goes over better on the streets of New York.

I moved out to LA, got an agent, started auditioning. I didn’t know anything about how it worked. And since I was really bad, luckily, I didn’t get any of those parts.

What is acceptable in our culture, I think, is really detrimental. I think we ought to have a little more ownership over the kind of material and the content that we put in front of people, especially young people.

Does celebrity interest anyone? It’s definitely not appealing to me. I think anyone who’s had any real exposure to it would probably regret ever having even entertained the idea.

Sometimes being an actor is kind of demanding in very different ways.

The first dog I had was owned by an abusive couple. He was very skittish. He wouldn’t let me hold him. It was explained to me that it was because of how he was treated.

I feel like whenever I do a movie, people think, ‘Well, that’s good, but that’s probably the best he’ll do.’ I sort of bang and bang and kick in a door, and people say, ‘Now a million doors will open for you.’ And they don’t.

Sometimes I pick parts because I think, ‘OK, it scares me,’ and that’s an indication it’s going to be a good movie for me to do. Sometimes that leaves me in a terrible… Well, it doesn’t always pan out, you know?

The first movie was mostly about George and Julia. This one is mostly about me and Catherine and our love story and our whole history. So it’s a very different movie.

When I was a kid, we didn’t really leave Cambridge, which was the town where I grew up in.

There isn’t any sibling rivalry; I think we have very different, very individual career paths and have never really thought that way. He’s my brother. I only have one, and we’re very close. We wouldn’t ever allow that stuff affect our relationship.

After high school, I drove out to L.A. with a friend of mine who had just graduated also, and I started auditioning. I got an agent, but it was all ‘Saved By the Bell’ auditions.

I get offered a lot of the same type of thing… The teenage slasher movies.

When I was young, I asked my priest how you could get to Heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to his children. You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.

I like studio movies; I love big commercial movies.

I get very sentimental, I get very nostalgic, and when I live in a place, I instantly put down way too many roots.

It seems like they never say anything bad about actors, they just pump them up.

I’m tired of answering questions about myself.

When people ask me why I don’t eat meat or any other animal products, I say, ‘Because they are unhealthy and they are the product of a violent and inhumane industry.’

It’s really fun when a scene doesn’t work.

I’ve run into people who say, ‘I know what you’re like: You’re a Boston guy.’ That’s so weird. This person who doesn’t know anything about me thinks they know a lot because of the city I grew up in, which, to me, is a meaningless label. There are all kinds of people from Boston.

Sometimes you read something, and there’s a part of you that remains in an analytical actor place. Am I going to do this movie? Is this a good part for me? Is it not? Can I bring something to this?

We obsess about celebrities. We create them, build myths around them, and then hunt them and destroy them. I don’t know where it’s taking us or what it means, but I know we do it. I have seen a lot of it myself.

If you have kids, you feel everything stronger. It’s like someone turning the lights on in your inner room.

I was really short in high school. I was stuck on the bench in the baseball team, so I just thought I’d try out theater, and that was the last time I did sports.

If I can’t see the humor in it, how am I going to be funny?

A movie’s very different from the book, and it’s different from the script, and it’s usually one person’s vision.

You sleep with people all the time that you hate.

They wanted me to do Scream 2, and I hate talking about movies I turned down, because it sounds judgmental. There’s nothing wrong with horror movies. I enjoy watching them. The main reason I turn a part down is if I think I won’t be good.

I think David Letterman is a genius. Night after night he is funny and smart. He seems to really enjoy his jokes. They seem connected to who he really is. I like watching him, and there is no one better at turning an awkward moment into something very funny.

I sort of fell in love with it when I was in high school doing theater. And so, as sometimes happens when kids – they graduate high school, and people turn to them and say, ‘So what are you going to do with your life?’ I thought, ‘Well, I like being onstage. I like being an actor.’

I knew it would be hard work, but that’s the reason you’re an actor. If you’re a bricklayer, you don’t want to just show up at someone’s house and put a little row of bricks around their garden. You want to build a building.

I think that the movies I do are the ones that I really like the least. I don’t like watching them because of that problem.

My family would be supportive if I said I wanted to be a Martian, wear only banana skins, make love to ashtrays, and eat tree bark.

When I like someone a lot, I get scared that I’ll let them down. My fear of sucking is worst when I feel like someone thinks I’m good.

I don’t really care that much about being a matinee idol.

My first exposure to TV, film, theater, the idea of what acting was, is I was a little kid, and my mom’s best friend was a local casting director in Cambridge, Mass. Her name was Patty Collinge.

I’m tired of playing the brat.

People should try eating no animal products for just one day a week.

If you look at the paths of other actors, most people have a curve where you hit it and there’s a time where you make a lot of money and they let you make your movies, and then they take it away and it’s gone.

Definitely, my approach is me-oriented. I feel like my job is to safeguard the believability of the emotions of the character.

If you’re a director and someone shows up and asks how I do it, I’d imagine, as a director, you’re like, ‘Man, I’ve got a million decisions to make; can you show up with an idea for the scene?’

In a movie we try to deceive. In theaters, as they say, the deceived are the wisest.

I’ve seen ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ about 25 times each, so I like all kinds of movies, but I’m drawn, as an actor, to dramas about humans living lives I can relate to.

Sometimes I feel like every movie I make could be the last. I know that’s not really the case, but if I think about it that way and I’m very careful, then maybe I can build a career, movie by movie, that I’m happy with.

A lot of the times, I end up having to do jobs to sort of pay the bills.

I have no desire to be famous at all.

There was no one moment when I decided I would spend my life acting. I am not certain that I will. Acting has never been a consistent passion. I have done it since I was young – so I have been acting for 30 years – but intermittently. I always had other jobs, joys, and creative outlets.

I love to think about and therefore talk about why people do what they do. That’s kind of why I like being an actor.

It’s part of the actor’s job to show up with a head full of steam, to have their own take on this. So that way, you’re not relying on, ‘OK, tell me how to do it.’

I love getting ready to do a scene, and thinking about it, and talking about it. But the rest of the time, I’m so nervous and obsessed. I’m just tearing my hair out in the trailer. The whole time I’m really tense.