Kevin Spacey Quotes

Wanting people to listen, you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you'll notice you've got their strict attention.

People sometimes say, "Isn't it boring, isn't it always the same? It's the same lines." I go, "Well, do you play tennis? Because that's the best analogy I can give." If you go out eight times and play tennis eight times this week, yeah it's the same rules but it's a different game every time you're out on that court.And that's the best analogy I can come up with the theater.

I felt that I shouldn't be an actor who just makes movie after movie in a quest for prestige and money.

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

People think that direct address was invented by Ferris Bueller, but in fact, it wasn't. It was invented by Shakespeare.

I don't care about my personal acting career anymore. I'm done with it. After 10 years of making movies and doing better than I ever could have imagined, I sort of had to ask myself: 'What am I supposed to do with all of this success that I have had?'

It's the kind of democratization of the Internet that has led to the breaking down of barriers into the creative arts.

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

I'm not someone who's led my life trying to get publicity; I'd rather do my work and go home.

The thing that is always so surprising about plays written in another century is how remarkably elastic they are. When you listen to the way in which Shakespeare attacks relationships, for example, even though the words may start off sounding foreign, in actuality they are so accessible, the motivations so clear, the resonances so contemporary. When you put it in a modern context - we could well be in a place with someone like Gaddafi or Mubarak - it becomes apparent how Richard III resonates with that type of personality, with media and manipulation, alliances and petty jealousies.

If someone can watch an entire season of a TV series in one day, doesn't that show an incredible attention span?

I became a bit of a jerk. A kind of a nasty jerk.

I can't imagine that anyone in Hollywood is sitting around trying to decide what actor is good or right or qualified for a role and is being denied a role because of their political views. I don't think that's the way Hollywood works. We're not living in an era of blacklisting.

The audience, the place you're in, has everything to do with how your performance goes.

I can imagine there is going to come a time when someone will do 13 hours of a story without breaks.

People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.

Whether that's positive or not, people are talking about the Old Vic Theater again with passion and commitment and controversy and debate.

I have talked to more people who are in politics who have said to me, "[House of Cards] is closer than you can imagine. It's the most accurate description of how politics actually works that we've ever seen." I mean, West Wing - beautiful, wonderful idea of how democracy should work. But I've had more people in politics say they think House of Cards is closer. I - don't know whether to take that as a compliment or a sad state of affairs.

I always thought that, in a way, you want your Superman to be a total unknown.

The audience wants control. They want freedom.

For me, coming to work every day has turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be.

Exposure to the arts and culture is enormously valuable.

A man can convince anyone hes someone else but never himself.

As the years have gone on, I find one of the dangers of watching dailies ... is you fall in love with moments.

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

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.

If you're not concerned about maintaining an image, you can pursue roads that another actor might not take.

I love producing, I love bringing things together.

If you're watching a film on your television, is it no longer a film because you're not watching it in a theatre? If you watch a TV show on your iPad, is it no longer a TV show? The device and the length are irrelevant; the labels are useless, except perhaps to agents and managers and lawyers, who use these labels to conduct business deals.

Edward Norton and I have known each other awhile. I just think he's the real deal, supremely talented and smart. He's got a great sense of humor.

The less you know about me, the easier it is to convince you that I am that character on screen.

What I do is interpret, not create. I may add elements and do something different. That is what is so incredible about theatre. Why do we love it that there are nine Hamletsor six King Lears over two years? We love to watch a different actor attack the same material.

After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley.

The more shows that are produced, the more writers are hired, producers are hired, actors are hired, directors are hired, it means the more people will get employed. It's better for the economy. It's a fantastic thing.

I've been around politics a long time. I've seen it at its best and its worst, been at so many events, listened to private conversations versus public speaking, understood the game of it, and in many ways the theatrics.

We've learned the lesson that the music industry didn't learn: give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they'll more likely pay for it rather than steal it.

It's not even about being negative. It's just being unsettled, unsatisfied, unfinished.

To look in the eyes of audiences and see the kind of naughty glee that they got with being on the inside, the audience becomes your co-conspirators.

I have to remember if I'm at some charitable event where kids are ... I try to remember don't swear in front of the kids!

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.

In recent years we've seen an explosion of creative programming, and I think it represents a third golden age of television because the creators have more control over the story. The audience doesn't care about the platform. They care about the content.

You must find a way to express your ideas and compel your audience to react through the idea itself, and then figuring out what the best representative of that idea may be, and bringing it to life.

You can't win a marathon without putting some bandaids on your nipples!

My mother was sarcastic and delightful and, trust me, quite remarkable.

Clarence Darrow was a unique and courageous man. Several of my favourite actors have played Darrow ... Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy.

When the story is good enough, people can watch something three times the length of an opera.

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.

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.

One of the tasks that any artistic director has is, you're trying to bring elements together that will work. The truth is that you could bring all the best talents in the world together and produce a big turkey.

I want to do better. I want to produce better stories. I want to do better plays.

My admiration for 'Mary Tyler Moore' is very, very big because they went out on top.

Whether it's 'Veep' or 'Homeland' or 'The West Wing' - which is a more idealised version of democracy - people are fascinated by politics.

The Old Vic has always been first and foremost an actors' theatre, a home for great talent and memorable performances.

Fortunately for me, I don't come from the school where you only measure success by how much money something makes or whether it has a big box-office weekend. I measure it by how much people actually participate in the process.

In film, movies' schedules are based on three things: actors' availabilities, when are sets being built, when you can rent the place you're going to film in.

I am so leading the life that I want and wanted and dreamed of as a kid. I'm trying very hard not to abuse it or take advantage of it.

Fundamentally, I like to accomplish things.

Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of 'House of Cards' at once, proved one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge as they've been doing on 'House of Cards' and lots of other shows, we should let them binge.

Let's let people live their lives and do it the way they want to do it,

I went through a period of great rebellion within my family, when I was about 9 or 10. I was mad, I had no focus, had no real interest in anything, and so I started to do things that were just rebellious and stupid.

It's not easy to sustain a long career, and sometimes I don't even think about how long I've been doing it.

If it were not for people who stepped forward and gave me opportunities at a time when I had not proved myself at all, believe me, I would not have a career.

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.

Because my mother was in love with Bobby Darin, I grew up with his records playing in our house all the time.

I want to bring theatre to a new generation, using the tools available to us, including taking it out to them on film and with new technology, but that is just so they can discover theatre. I want them to come in and sit in a theatre. This is the way to plant seeds.

I don't want to show deleted scenes. I don't like an audience looking at what the movie might have been - if it's in the movie, it's in the movie.

Life's all about perceptions.

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

Francis Underwood was entirely based on Richard III. When Michael Dobbs wrote 'House of Cards' in the original British series, Richard III is what he based the character on.

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

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 don't even think in terms of ambition.

The greatest sound in the theater is silence.

We gotta be willing to let it hurt. You know, all this notion that acting is "yeah it's pretend" and yes we enjoy it and yeah we can have a good time with it. But if you wanna LAND, you wanna make an impact, you want those FUCKERS TO REMEMBER YOU! Then you have to let it hurt sometimes. You gotta get there because that's all an audience ever wants. Is for you to open up your chest and show them that you have a fucking heart. That's all we want. A heart. A human being. Not an affectation.

There does seem to be in the U.S. now an ideology and an entrenchment that has stopped people doing what they are hired to do, which is govern rather than run for office the whole time.

You can't turn a "no" to a "yes" without a "maybe" in between.

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.

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

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.

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.

I certainly identify with the role of mentor and, to some degree, maybe teacher. I do a lot of work with kids at the Old Vic.

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

Anyone with a internet connection and an idea can develop an audience

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 love doing impressions.

Both 'Consenting Adults' and 'Glengarry Glen Ross' revolve around the economic stresses of the '90s. They are about what people do when they're pushed against that wall, and how they're manipulated. They are both morality tales, though in very different genres.

London is a very energising place to be.

Where the gaming world is going - and certainly Activision proved it by hiring me - is being willing to push and bend and move in a new direction of actually capturing the character and storytelling.

Studios and networks who ignore either shift - whether the increasing sophistication of storytelling, or the constantly shifting sands of technological advancement - will be left behind,

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.

I can't judge the characters I play, because it's for the audience to do. What I can try to do is to understand and embody what were they going through? How did they make the decisions they made? That to me is a more interesting way to approach something, rather than saying this person is a villain and that person is this and - because it's not very interesting to play that anyway.

But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.

I've never done a movie that's shot more than 40 days because I just don't do those kinds of films.

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

Audiences grew to like this duality of feeling, where you're both championing a character and you're revolted by them.

I'm not a writer, and I don't want there to be any mistake about that.

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.

Why is 'Game of Thrones' the most pirated show in the history of TV? Because people can't get it fast enough, that's why.

What I like about Britain is that I can live a normal life here.

I never doubted at all. If you ever doubt then you are in trouble. I never thought: 'I should do this or that in case I don't make it.' I never had a back-up plan.