Richard Dreyfuss Quotes

Well, I can't (sing or dance). Actually, I sing like a seal and dance like your Uncle Leo at that wedding where he got up and went 'ya, ya, ya'.

Kerry is an adult - he thinks things through. He learns from the present as well as the past. To George Bush, thinking things through is for sissies.

There is one solution to all of our problems: Teaching our kids clarity of thought and political representation in democracy. That's it.

The happiest I ever been was when I was a struggling actor. I've had big houses and small houses. I always had work available for most of my career. When I actually had to find jobs to make money, that's when I was happy.

In my experience, it's usually up to the actor how a character is portrayed.

I took the part in 'Mr. Holland's Opus' because no one had ever asked me to play 'a life' before. I get to age through 30 years. The idea really challenged me.

I spoke so much about being a manic-depressive. I want to bring everyone back to my earliest memories of this companion of mine. Some people call this companion I have an ailment, or worse a terrible nightmare from which some people cannot awaken. I know that I have nothing to be ashamed of. I have nothing that should garner a stigma.

Theater is completely different from film or television. It has a beginning and a middle and an end and it's different every night. And it's far preferable to any other except in the sense of not getting paid, people who want to eat should do film and television.

Wake up and live. It's a fast world out there.

I said to my doctor, 'You gotta testme, there's something wrong with me that I would be behaving this way.'

I never had a role that I set out for. I always wanted to have a body of work that I'm proud of. Save for two projects, which will never pass my lips, I'm happy with what I've done.

In a way, J.F.K. was the high point of the American dream. In order to go to the moon and back, all we did was say we could - and we did.

It's fun to see the light in someone's eyes. It's fun to give your own eccentric experience and have it land. That's fun.

I believe that a nation that allows music to be expendable is in danger of becoming expendable itself.

Let's give some substance to patriotism. It may take a generation.

Tabouli is the best salad, but still, you don't win friends with salad

The rules are all wrong today. The mandate of the media really does pre-date the founding of the United States.

I don't know what its like for most actors, but really clearly for myself acting has always been the fulfilment of personal fantasies. It isn't just art, its about being a person I've always wanted to be, or being in a situation, or being a hero.

When you work in front of the people, either in a film or in television, the people who are in the room with you are not watching you work, they're working so you'd have to light a fire to get them to watch what you were doing.

I decided at age 9, but I was reinforced at age 13 when a teacher told me I had talent. I can't say she really motivated me because I already knew. I knew I had talent. I went to the Jewish community theater and got in plays there. Then I went for the movies.'

It is an obvious and blatant stupidity beyond my ability to articulate how dumb it is for us not to teach our children how to run the government.

I really think that living is the process of going from complete certainty to complete ignorance.

Part of me is still waiting to grow up, to be an adult, and the other part knows there is no such thing.

Civics is not only how to run the country before it's your turn to run the country; it is, in fact, the study of power, practical political power. And you must start that process at an age level when kids' brains are still open and malleable.

We didn't get along, me and Bill Murray. But I've got to give it to him: I don't like him, but he makes me laugh even now. I'm also jealous that he's a better golfer than I am.

People who commit adultery must die. Everyone knows that. Any movie tells you that!

The bad guy always gets the best scene and the best lines in the film, and they usually get the most days off.

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a teacher, a history teacher. After all, teaching is very much like performing. A teacher is an actor, in a way. It takes a great deal to get, and hold, a class.