Ron Perlman Quotes

I realized you don't need to belong to any fuckin' edifice or ascribe to any dogma to have a relationship with God, to be a good person. You just have to be a good person.

I had an opportunity to be in Frank's [Sinatra] circle, but I couldn't take advantage of it because I couldn't get over how awed I was by him. It was so uncomfortable for me because he meant so much to me, but I just couldn't be myself, so I fled rather than having those great nights hanging out.

No matter what line of work you do, success cannot truly be achieved until you own who you are. The most offensive liability then becomes an asset. It makes you perform your best, regardless of the challenges you might face.

Living off the grid and being kind of an outlaw brings a dangerous reality.

None of us are any better than anyone else and none of us are any worse than anyone else, and we're all equal and whatever we can do to celebrate our commonality rather than our differences, which is what religion does, to me ... religion just compartmentalizes people and makes everybody into a box.

You back a big cat into a corner and somebody is going to get bloody.

I like playing interesting people, I like playing slightly twisted people. I like playing people who have large appetites who are kind of a bit larger than life.

I lost 90 pounds and my blood pressure went down to a normal level and the salt in my urine disappeared. And that was when I had to make the transition from fat character actor to thin character actor.

I, for one, am not nearly as engaged when I'm looking at something that's been completely drawn up on a computer that replaces anything that's in real time and real space. It just engages me all the less, rather than all the more.

Let me put it this way: I definitely need to understand the villains I play. The best cause pain to anesthetize themselves against their own pain.

I actually think it's harder to play vulnerability, because you're having to delve deeper into portions of your own psyche, what it is that makes you human.

You know, I don't read the blogs, or go on the internet, and I really just don't know what people are saying because ... well I guess I'm afraid to.

I'm real comfortable around people, and it took a long time for me to evolve to that point.

Somebody who doesn't care if they live or die is the most dangerous human being on earth.

Fuck waiting for the world to change you; you start by trying to change it. And if you are pure of heart and your intentions are good, you can't lose. Even if nothing happens, you can't lose.

I'll walk through fire to do what I do because the movie business, when it's right, is the coolest art form ever invented.

I was working more on a primal, instinctive level. And it just seemed to suit me; it seemed to suit my concentration span, it seemed to suit my personal style of performance, and I have fallen in love with film acting.

I don't think that I've had a career like anyone else's, but there are hosts and hosts of actors whose careers I admire.

Working at a job that you hate. Having a career and a life that you have no passion for. That's hell.

I'm fully aware that things that resonate and become real hits are the exception to the rule, so much so that I've wired myself for failure.

Guys who are larger than life and theatrical and deliciously unpredictable - they're far more interesting than the good guys most of the time. They have these psychological layers that an audience can really cling on to, become fascinated with, much more so than these true-blue, one-dimensional, square-jawed good guys.

I've always felt there were aspects of me that were monstrous, and you can either hide from it or confront it, embrace it and understand that those are aspects that make you unique and define you and motivate you. You can either overwhelm or overcompensate for them
but they truly define you as a human being ... So that life became a question of either dealing with this monstrousness in one way or another ... One finds a way to understand and make friends with that monster and understand that that's the very thing that makes you who you are. That's your emotional and spiritual fingerprint.

My whole mantra is, "Go big or go home." I don't want to just play a guy who dresses up. I want to play the person who threw down.

The luxury of television is that you get more than one shot at who you think the guy is that you're playing.

That's always been Guillermo's preference, is to have as much there practically as is humanly possible, and that digital graphic images are more a punctuation mark than they are a replacement.

1% of the population has all the money and the other 99% have nothing.

A lot of people have been bent one way or the other on that. I'm not going to weigh in on that; I'm happy to still be at large, I'll just put it that way.

Literature is nothing more than the expansion of storytelling. Storytelling is obviously the impulse to chronicle something you've been through in order to give it its due, to have a catharsis.

Once the real you emerges and appears unfettered, naked, and completely in touch with the good, the bad, and the ugly, then you really meet yourself. Then all those things take on a different perspective as well.

I feel as though my criteria are based more on how challenging the role is, it doesn't have to fit into any particular profile, is it something that I've never done before, and is it something that I feel like I can really feel challenged and therefore fully engaged in, and that's when the work gets to be the most fun.

I've never worked with a tail, that I can remember. But there's so much I can't remember.

I never direct myself, because I don't like working with me. I would punch me in the mouth if I had to take my direction.

You start talking about God and a lot of people are going to become very defensive.

In the early '90s, when those little art films started coming out, we were introduced to Quentin Tarantino and guys like that, and independent cinema was something that everyone wanted to be a part of.

It's really disgusting what Hollywood can do to a guy.

I will not do a role that I don't think I can do, that I'm not interested in, where there's no humanity, that doesn't have any kind of handle for me at all because I know I'll just stink the joint up.

I love to continue to challenge myself and put myself in situations that are slightly uncomfortable.

I'm continuing to do research into biker culture.

I say yes to almost anything that comes my way.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

I live in a bubble.

Fearless people are interesting to watch.

I like being this guy who says we're all in this together. I've gone right up to the top and said, "You might be the producer, the guy with all the money, but treat people with respect goddammit, because if you don't, you're going to hear from me. We're all equal here, from the lowliest guy to the filmmaker. We are all trying to bring our A-game here, so don't fuck with people.

Distortions control my self-image, like they do for a lot of us. It's irrational.

I think in the early part of my career, the roles were so disparate that it never gave anybody an opportunity to understand my essence and what I would be good at doing, as opposed to what I would not be good at doing, so these little moments of beautiful things that were happening to me were consistent, but very few and very far between.

I like doing voiceover work. I just like it in general, because you're constantly working on a very first-instinct level. You show up, you get in front of the microphone, you look at the lines, you say the lines, and then you move on. You work on a really primal level, is what I'm saying. You don't have to shave. You don't even have to wear pants. But, uh, that wasn't your question.

Independent film is almost nonexistent right now, because all the distributers that used to love to put out these little art films are all out of business right now, because it costs so much to open a movie.

Every job has a unique situational circumstance.

The things that are celebrated as human decency, true heroism, true self-sacrifice, and with a kind of leadership that was completely iconoclastic during the first half of the twentieth century are nearly forgotten. All of a sudden we started looking inward and becoming obsessed with behavior, idiosyncrasies, human flaws, and all this stuff. Some great accomplishments happened in the second half of the twentieth century, don't get me wrong, but in the process we lost a template of what truly being human looks like.

So much of my aesthetic was formed by my dad.

Well, I love acting, and I love acting quick.

I like to believe that everyone is born with the same skill set, and that it is the influences that one comes upon.

I've never been pigeonholed and I've experienced so many different kinds of skin - what man will do and won't do, what you should do and shouldn't do. This is what's exciting about being an actor; where philosophy majors sit in classrooms or write books about human behavior, we're actually acting them out in front of cameras.

I don't ever want to be comfortable with anything I'm doing.

I've had biker clubs reach out to me whenever they knew I was in their city.

Really, I was such a late bloomer, I really didn't learn how to be me until I was in my late '40s, which is when I started playing roles that were closer to me.

You can change the circumstances but you can never change man's inner nature.

You draw on your own childhood every time you tee it up as an actor.

I love great animation.

We like people for their qualities, but we love them for their defects." In writing this line I meant to say that we must not simply "accept" imperfection when it is revealed to us - we must celebrate it. This, I assure you, is the true sign of friendship.

the pace at which Sean Connery speaks stems from a decision he's made. And every single vowel delivered is with respect for the language. But he delivers it so naturally and with so much humanity that you don't realize that, technically, he is giving a master class in how to deliver a line.

Cinema to me is like a religion. If I was going to have a religion it would be cinema.

I've been a professional actor for almost 40 years.

I think there are a lot of technocrats in the business who would much rather work with just wheels and gears and machinery. Those things interest them more than humanity and I wish them the best of luck.

I do voicework all the time.

War, war never changes.

I'm just trying to make up for lost times, and I have total awareness that when the work is coming it doesn't mean it's going to continue to come, so I'm taking advantage of this phenomenal period that I'm in now, to its fullest.

I love showing up and giving a performance without the benefit of a lot of rehearsal or dissection. It's fun to me to act on a kind of instinctual level and go straight for the performance.