Jesse Eisenberg Quotes

Every relationship has a kind of pattern, I guess, and maybe the pattern is more important than the stuff that makes up the pattern.

When you do a play, you have the kind of nightly feeling of accomplishment. But you also have the daily dread of the doing it every night. And because you're doing the whole thing every day, it's like climbing up the mountain every single night. With a movie it's like climbing the mountain very slowly, over months of filming.

I don't understand capri pants. They seem like neither here nor there.

I'm hardly the most notable person in 'Zombieland.' The other actors in it are way more famous than I am.

I feel things can always be funny, but that's probably because I have some kind of leftover childhood need to make people laugh. For somebody like me, that's the thing you excel at.

Acting forces me to socialise, which is good for me, I think.

I don't watch the movies I'm in - ever. Sometimes I keep pictures, but that's it. I used to watch my movies, because I didn't want to be rude to the people making them, but I stopped a few years ago. I think it's pretty common among actors. It's like listening to your own voice, but multiplied by a million.

I have one female fan. But she lives with me. I'm not aware of any others.

I think I prioritize other people's opinions of me very highly, which is not necessarily a good thing - it's a thing that causes a lot of anxiety.

Often times, being in a popular thing means that you have to compromise your own acting.

Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we're all heroes of our own lives.

If you're acting, then there's a prescribed way to behave; whereas in life, there's no prescribed way. So acting feels like a comfortable way to get through the day.

I find it very difficult to do normal things without getting approached.

I live in New York City, so there's so much stimulation when you walk outside, it does not require a television in the home.

When cellphones came out, my girlfriend refused to get one for five years, because she thought it would turn her into somebody who couldn't connect with other people - and, of course, she got a cellphone.

I think it's a room full of insecure actors, which is ultimately very comforting.

I'm not into music - the only music I like is musical theater, but I have every Ween album.

[As an actor] you're looking to crawl into an anonymous fictional person's skin, but then you have the ironic obligation to promoting the movie in such a public way that it almost undermines the initial intention of going under the radar.

The movies that are really big, at least in my experience, oftentimes don't have characters that I feel as personally connected to.

In acting class, you're trained to express yourself as much as you can.

When playing a role, I would feel more comfortable, as you're given a prescribed way of behaving. So, both Facebook and theatre provide contrived settings that provide the illusion of social interaction.

The truth is people are very nice. The other truth is, it's very annoying to be constantly interrupted. I don't love myself enough to want to share myself with everybody.

It's so nerve-wracking to be on a set. They're the most stressful place in the world, because you're making something permanent, and there are so many people relying on you in a lot of ways.

Any time you play a character for a long period of time, regardless of how close it is to you, it infiltrates your life. It's impossible for it not to.

I am actually going to two therapists right now. I don't know, I actually feel like therapy has just made me more uncomfortable.

No compliment is ever sufficient and every insult, of course, is true.

The first rule of Zombieland: Cardio. When the zombie outbreak first hit, the first to go, for obvious reasons ... were the fatties.

If you look at the movies that come out, most of them are bad, so it's not as if achieving some level of success means you get offered better roles, because frankly they don't seem to exist.

I feel like when I was 13 and I had to go to bar mitzvahs every weekend. This is the same feeling. You have to put on a suit every weekend to go meet with a bunch of Jews.

When you take on a role you try to do as much as possible beforehand to get your mind into it. Just to prepare because it's a daunting prospect to go six months or whatever.

I grew up in an apolitical household. I never left the country. When I became an adult, I started traveling and became interested in politics, and I probably talked about things in a silly, ignorant way.

People think, 'You're an actor, you can afford clothes,' but I just try to take the clothes from the movie, which makes the selecting of film projects that much more difficult, because you try to play characters that might wear something you'd want to wear.

People ask me what my hobbies are in interviews, and I always say biking. But all I bike for is to get to rehearsal more quickly.

Prisoner One: I'm sick of it here. I have dreams, man. I wanna travel up the coast, fall in love with a Babylonian woman and stone her to death when she menstruates.

Prisoner 2: That does sound nice. But I think I prefer to serve out my time here and live a relaxing life in Pompeii. Maybe teach Latin to at-risk youth. You know, give back a little.

I made the mistake of writing something very, very short about Obama for this website that I write fiction for, and my father told me never do that again. And he was right. I have nothing to add to a political conversation because it's not my area.

I often think if you have time to sit around the house feeling bad for yourself, you have time to tutor a child. I'm guilty of that exact thing. I will spend more time sitting around feeling bad for myself than actually helping somebody.

I don't go to movies, I don't own a television, I don't buy magazines and I try not to receive mail, so I'm not really aware of popular culture.

When you're acting in a movie, you never consider the reception of it. It's impossible to predict how something will be received. Even if you think it's the greatest thing in the world, other people might not like it. Or agree with it.

I have a job that requires me to be in the public eye in the way that makes me extra careful about sharing information.

As an actor, if I show up late somewhere or I say something that's eccentric, it's totally acceptable - not only that, it's lauded in some perverse way.

You can tell when you watch a movie, usually, what the actors' experience was on the movie, because even the smallest of roles were interesting.

Look, I don't have a Facebook page because I have little interest in hearing myself talk about myself any further than I already do in interviews or putting any more about myself online than there already is. But if I wasn't in this position, I'm sure I would use it every day.

The more people say nice things about me, the more I feel it's false.

I think I'm an abstinence symbol. If I take my shirt off, people will not have babies.

I tend to prefer the smaller movies because they shoot more efficiently and so you're are able to maintain that momentum of the character a little more easily.

I think it's my nature to - every time I hear about an award or a nomination, it makes me realize how much I must've been losing before, because I was not aware that every major city had these critics' awards.

Nothing is harder than working with an actor who doesn't take it seriously or show up in the same way that you are.

Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize - it's a far more visceral experience. It's really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person's backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It's just kind of impossible.

Lies are for adults who are sad in their lives.

The happiest moments for me, creatively, are doing readings of a play around a table where there's no audience.

Mother Teresa was asked what was the meaning of life, and she said to help other people, and I thought, 'What a strange thing to say' - but maybe it's the right thing to say.

Depression, if it's an unconsciously elected experience, is a luxury.

I'm kind of shocked any time somebody hires me and even more shocked any time somebody hires me to play a character like Lex Luthor, which I only knew from the public consciousness of him being a bald, brooding villain who is older than me.

I grew up in a secular suburban Jewish household where we only observed the religion on very specific times like a funeral or a Bar Mitzvah.

It's very hard to be a playwright because it's very competitive.

Don't be a hero, live to fight another day.

Actors dread working with studios because they dictate what you do in a way that independent movies can't.

It's a really unique acting opportunity to play two roles who are not only interacting with each other, but vastly different.

I guess the more serious you play something, if the context is funny, then it will be funny and it doesn't really require you to be necessarily, explicitly humorous, or silly.

I cried every day of first grade. In class. Which meant I ended up getting comfortable emoting in a place where it wasn't the norm.

In those moments where you're not quite sure if the undead are really dead, dead, don't get all stingy with your bullets. I mean, one more clean shot to the head, and this lady could have avoided becoming a human Happy Meal. Woulda ... coulda ... shoulda.

It's a struggle for me to watch things I've been in because I'm just distracted and self-critical.

It's a very strange experience to watch yourself in a movie anyway. I most frequently don't do it, but if I was going to do it, I would do it in a private way, not at a public screening at a film festival, which is just an overwhelming experience.

As an actor, you are in a unique position because you're not only memorizing dialogue but really embodying it. You naturally feel the rhythm of good writing.

But kids think differently than adults think. Adults have spent so many years thinking more and more like each other because the more you live with other people the less you think like yourself and the more you think like them. But kids are new people so we still think more normally.

The only suggestions I get on my plays is to make them more of what they already are, and that's wonderful.

I don't attribute an actor's great success to their own individual performance when it's something as collaborative as a movie.

And I'm sure after Facebook it will be the little cameras that we have implanted into the palms of our hands and we'll be debating whether we should get them, and then we'll all get them.

I just can't - I can't exist in normal group situations. A classroom, where you have to sort of jockey for position, compete for attention - I would just withdraw.

The joy of acting for me is to be able to experience emotions in a safe environment. You can't scream and cry in the street because everybody will look. If you do it on a movie set, you get applauded.

Who walks around proud of things they've done? That's an obnoxious quality.

Acting is a weird profession. It's very disquieting, and at the time it just made me so confused. It's only when you step away from a movie for several weeks or months that you start to put things in perspective.

I meet people who are in movies, and the stuff that they write is terrible, but nobody tells them that because they're famous. So I worry that my stuff might be like that, too.

Where I feel something that I had written was misinterpreted in a way that made people feel bad, that is absolutely horrifying to me. I feel so embarrassed and I feel ashamed that I should make people feel bad.

When you're on set you don't realize the way something is going to look since you're on the other side of the camera.

I don't watch the movies I've been in. I try to stay as little aware of the final product as possible, because my job doesn't really change.

There's something strange about theater. My characters consistently demonize elitism, but of course it's taking place in a theater where only so many people can see it. I've been in silly popcorn movies - the kind of thing that as an actor you might feel embarrassed about - but those movies reach many more people.

I personally don't feel the need to be radical for its own sake, but I probably couldn't if I tried anyway.

Everybody feels like they need a photograph because we're in a generation where, if you don't document it, it didn't occur. So you've got to stop and take a picture with everybody.

I think there are probably a lot of actors like me who I think probably struggle to feel comfortable in their own lives, and acting in some ways provides a safe context for them to live out emotions that they possibly repress or live out experiences that they are not afforded by virtue of circumstance.

I purposefully isolate myself from anything that has to do with any press. I don't read any press about myself.

Society will decide after the technology is created what we will and won't accept.

I always think the second worst thing in the world is to go on stage at night, and the first worst thing in the world is sitting at home at night. For me, it's scarier to not be doing it than doing it.

I don't follow sports that much now, but I was a Phoenix Suns fanatic in the early '90s.

My feeling is ... when you show up to a movie set where there's, like, 50 people standing around and months of preparation gone into it, you want to be as prepared as possible, so you should make a million baguettes. That might not actually help in any explicit way, but it'll make you feel more prepared.

I'm no good at really anything that involves motor skills.

First rule of magic? Always be the smartest guy in the room.

I like driving; I don't drive since I live in New York. I don't have an opportunity to drive, like, ever.

I give credence to the worst things somebody writes about me, and if somebody writes something nice, I think they're wrong or false or lying or joking.

I did children's theater when I was younger, and then when I was about 14 I started doing theater in New York City.

As an actor, you have to be open to doing things where you look stupid, to be experimental.

Working in the arts, you see people who come from terrible circumstances and who, for whatever reason, have incredible talent. But of course, with that great talent comes some guilt because, if you come from circumstances that don't encourage it, it can be really confusing.

I don't have a Facebook page because I have little interest in hearing myself talk about myself any further than I already do in interviews or putting any more about myself online than there already is.

I think there's nothing more wonderful than using fiction to reflect real-world cultural ideas.

Acting is a weird, kind of alienating job because you're in an isolated place. Even if you're working with a lot of other people, you're kind of alienated. Actors say that a lot, and I kind of find that to be true.

If you're afraid of everything out there, you quit going out there.