Mark Ruffalo Quotes

I live a bourgeois life.

I have a carpool with a corrections officer and a construction worker. My kids get to see that we're not segregated based on wealth or standing. It's very cool.

When you're a young actor, and you're really fighting to have your place in the world - for me, anyway - it took a mental focus and energy and striving. It took a long time. And it was my whole life.

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

They would never let me be a crossing guard when I was a little kid. It would come up, I'd always raise my hand, I would never get picked . They thought I was too wild, but I knew I was responsible enough, if I was given that task.

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

But, the relationships that I see work - As long as they're telling the truth, and saying the things that you don't ever want to have to say to another human being.

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.

We'll engage in pretty extreme violence in the world but, you know, the one thing that comes to humans as easily as eating or breathing or sleeping, is sex.

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

Commercials that are geared towards kids. I think they should just, like, wipe them out.

The one great thing about a continuing collaboration is that they know you. And if you're really lucky, they really believe in you and think that your talent has some unending bounds to it.

That's what I love about music ... all these banalities suddenly turn into these beautiful, effervescent pearls.

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.

It really is the relationship you have with your self that presents the key to the "kingdom", so to speak ... Fighting is good, but not when it is fighting yourself. Changing the world is good but first one has to start inside and concurrently make that place right. The strife and the ugliness in the world is the outward manifestation of this troubled relationship we have within on a whole.

But in my heart of hearts, this is the kind of thing ... this is what everyone is struggling with in their lives - relationships and family. To me, it's always an interesting area to mine. I'm drawn to it.

As an actor, you want to remain vulnerable. You don't want to always have all the answers and you want to be fine doing things in the moment with your fellow actors.

I don't understand how people can take a gentle, loving life and treat it with such cruelty.

It is a fact that our fresh water is becoming more scarce and that the new ways we are getting energy in America - fracking, mountaintop removal, cyclic steam extraction, deep-sea drilling - all pollute water, pollute the air, and pollute our soil and food.

Even if my movies weren't big blockbusters, directors generally liked me, so they would fight for me.

That was an interesting aspect: to go to war with the Church to fight for the very thing that the Church was meant to give to people

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.

Studio movies are looking more like independent movies and independent movies are looking more like studio movies, and I think cinema is better now because of it.

We're clearly coming to the end of the fossil fuel era. We have the technology to shift to renewable energy, we have the will of the people. The only thing that's keeping us back is the fossil fuel industry's hold on our political system. That's what we need to change.

I didn't really have any interest in producing anything.

I don't like to go to the gym very much if I can help it.

"What is normal?" really becomes the question. What is normal, and how are we fooled into thinking it's something other than what we're doing at any given time. Every family has either a drug addict or an alcoholic or some sort of dysfunction that the family is dealing with. And I think the grace of this family is that they actually could be that far out there but also be forgiving, and be really human, and be human in front of each other without much shame.

We are turning our grief into winnable actions.

Burning natural gas will not save us from climate change. It's the same as burning any other carbon-based fuel.

I didn't like the distance between my family and myself that I was experiencing from having to work all the time.

No great undertaking ever looks like it's winnable. That only comes later and only if you are lucky and are willing to fight and have a group of folks around you that are willing to do the same thing, too.

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.

My dad sent me a text saying, 'You know who you should play? Columbo. That's your Academy Award.'

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.

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.

I always like having kid energy around. I think it's good for a movie, even when you're doing dramatic stuff.

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

Each role, I feel like takes you on a different journey based on who that character is.

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.

As an actor, I started using dreams more, which is not mystical or anything like that. I just found that I've been using that as a tool to give me another point of view towards the work. It's often surprising but really helpful.

I love acting and I love it in all its different manifestations.

It seems like they conflate Bruce and the Hulk. It's usually, 'Hulk!' as I'm walking across the street. But sometimes it's 'Banner!' If you go on my Twitter feed, you'll see it's mostly Hulk. I think it was pretty spectacular what we were able to accomplish with CGI with 'The Hulk,' and I can't take full credit for that.

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

I don't have to be a leading man. I can be a character actor. That's really what interests me anyway.

Some of my favorite scenes aren't in the movie. Because you, at some point, realize that your responsibility as director is purely to the story. It's not to your pleasure.

I've just been more interested in doing film right now and I don't want to go away from my family for six months, which was what I would have had to have done if I did the play on Broadway.

I got into acting because I wanted to act and I love acting. That's my true north: to be creative and to be challenged in what I love to do.

I don't like this idea of Method. I come from that school, but what I was taught was that it's your imagination. You do your homework, and you use your imagination.

My first cut was three hours and 17 minutes. And then I just became very shrewd about the editing.

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.

You really can have your dreams and at the same time have a family. But it has to be a really deliberate practice.

I have two hammocks, one Mayan and one Guatemalan, both family size because I like to lie in them perpendicular. When I'm working on a character, I lie in them and daydream. They're the best tools for working that I have.

I come from a traditional theater background.

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.

When people sit across from people - gay, straight, whatever - and they talk, they find out that people they may have been demonizing for their lifetime aren't the demons we've expected them to be.

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.

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

I like to think the movies that I've picked have something worthwhile to say. Something relevant.

Trying to find the story within the story was hard. Filmmaking is such a reductive process in a strange way and you keep whittling away to what is essential.

Ask people who are close to the natural world: farmers, people who work the land or in some way use the land for their livelihoods. They will tell you what they are seeing isn't so good. They will tell you the changes they have seen in the past twenty years are remarkable in one way or another and unlike anything they had seen before that.

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

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?

I guess the biggest lesson would be to have faith in that little part of yourself that knows what it's doing, knows what it wants, knows what you should be doing, even when all the clamour around you is telling you something else. That's the part that you want to keep alive and that's the part that people want to see when they see you on the screen.

I've been having a lot of fun with the Hulk motion-capture stuff, actually. The only distinction that I hold is that I am the only actor to ever play Banner and the Hulk.

For some reason, my whole life has been, 'You can't do this, you can't do that.'

I am grateful to the fossil fuel industry for bringing us the concentrated carbon that took us through the Industrial Revolution and through the technological revolution and brought us to the gateway of the renewable energy revolution, or what I call the sunlight revolution. But that is where we must part ways. It's the natural order.

By electrifying our lives, we reduce our energy costs by 39 percent, which is a huge savings in itself.

That's my secret Cap: I'm always angry.

Actors, you kind of have these ebbs and flows. These moments where you're in your glory - where you're really cracking - and moments where you're not.

I love acting with kids, cause they're great acting partners. They're totally present. Even when they're acting, they're still available and you can crack them up or something weird will happen and they'll go with it.

The idea of selling is a projection that people create about people that is more of a reflection of who they are than what is actually happening in front of them with the artist.

With indies, all they have is their script and it's very important to them. The characters are better drawn, the stories more precise and the experience greater than with studio films where sometimes they fill in the script as they're shooting.

And my mother caught wind of this. She never had really tried to guide my career or really had any say in my life as an adult, but this was the one time she said she would never speak to me again if I quit acting.

I want to do a western. Nobody does westerns anymore.

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.

There is nothing a good long walk can't help work out.

No great advancement has ever been kept at bay because of ideology, nor greed. Eventually progress moves us forward.

When you have to fight for the things you love, you have to measure the value of those things in ways you may not in any other way.

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

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

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.

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.

People are like, 'How does Julianne Moore look naked?' I don't know. She was pressed up against me the whole time. I couldn't look at her.

If I'm working in the city, then as soon as I'm home, I try to lock in on my son for a few hours. Every day. I see how important it is that he's starting to come into my world now. It's just an effort to give him that male mode of being.

I think people ought to realize that if you're doing investigative reporting, you're putting something on your newspaper or on your website that no one can get anywhere else, and theoretically at least, that should make people subscribe.

It is a fact that, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution. It is a fact that we are already dealing with the catastrophe of climate change in places like California, where people have been burnt out of their homes and where they are dealing with record droughts.

What makes Hulk afraid? It's himself. It's a version of himself that's weak. It's a version of himself that's vulnerable. It's a child inside of him.

Nothing anyone says in a bar is true.

The working-class folks and the poor, and those normal people living their lives out in the world without the glitter and the fanfare. There is a lot to learn from them.

Climate change is not going away. It will only get more extreme and more dangerous with time. There is no hiding from it. Yes, those living in poverty today will be hit first and the hardest, but we are all going to feel it and see it. We already are.

I woke up one morning with the knowledge that I had a brain tumor. It wasn't so much that I dreamt I had a brain tumor; it was like someone just poured the knowledge into my head. It wasn't like an image; it was just like knowing. It was so weird, which is why I paid attention.

The biggest industry hoax is that the United States can't move to renewable energy now. It's a lie.

A leader in America or anyone who says they truly care about this nation without taking some kind of action is either a liar or insane. In either case, they are unfit to lead.

Renewable energy fits well into the conservative mindset by allowing competition into the energy markets so that consumers have choice. The system as it is, with big utilities monopolizing the energy playing field or fossil fuel energy being given massive subsidies so that they are on a kind of corporate welfare, is the antithesis of conservative principles.

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

You can tell a lot about a person by what's on their playlist.

People who are slavish to a fantasy ideology become very lonely in the world. It's very alienating and sometimes reality is very threatening to this magical way of thinking. On the other hand, if it is a politician or leader that chooses for whatever reason to remain

My own mother fought to make herself more than a possession; she lived her life as a mother who chose when she would have children, and a wife who could earn a living if she so chose. I want my daughters to enjoy that same choice.

There is a quote that my acting teacher Stella Adler wrote in her book [The Art of Acting], which I asked her to sign: "The young actor feels some greatness inside themselves that they want to give back to the world." That resonated with me, but I didn't really understand what she was talking about until much later, in the way you surmised that my struggle to become an actor was from being this kind of introverted young boy

When you're trying to do character work that's different from what people expect from you, you're sort of in territory that is uncharted, and you don't know how it's playing all the time.