Kevin Spacey Quotes

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.

Sometimes the person who is the most logical is the person whom we call insane.

To know what you want, to understand why you're doing it, to dedicate every breath in your body to achieve... If you feel you have something to give, if you feel that your particular talent is worth developing, is worth caring for then there's nothing you can`t achieve.

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.

Stay true to your brand and true to your voice and audiences will respond to that authenticity with enthusiasm and passion.

People have different reasons for the way they live their lives. You cannot put everyone's reasons in the same box.

The only thing worse than a loser is someone who won't admit he played badly.

Secret Cinema has created a new way of experiencing film. The fusion of film and theatre allows for a much more powerful experience and adds an incredibly unique dimension for the audience. It certainly did for me. I was blown away

You have to always be ready, always be alive, and always be willing to move in a new direction.

I find it sad that by not talking about who I sleep with, that makes me mysterious. There was a time when I would have been called a gentleman.

We have 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.

Mediocrity is the elephant in the room.

We're all victims of our own hubris at times.

I think you need the failures to get the success. You learn more from that.

The story is everything, which means it's our job to tell better stories.

I was not a studious kid, and I struggled to find things that would command my attention and engage my ideas and energies.

Our job, you know, in the entertainment profession is to try to illuminate and show people all sides of humanity, and it doesn't just mean that you can only do movies that are only about the good parts of us. You have to be able to eliminate the bad parts.

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.

I have never played a game in my life.

The journey that we go on as actors is an interesting one and sometimes a revealing one.

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

If you're lucky enough to have done well, then it's your responsibility to send the elevator back down.

I suppose the most important thing is to stay interested. It's very easy in life if you get to a place where you're successful to hit the same groove on the record player over and over again because it's safe.

Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get.

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

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

Theatre is organic, film is not. Theatre you come every day and you work with a group of people and you're are all up for it and you all get to do the whole thing every night, be it two hours or three hours. In film you work in two or three minute bits and it's never in chronological order and then someone takes that away and makes it look like it all happened, or that you gave that performance.

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?

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.

I open myself up every time I walk on screen and give you everything that I am. There are parts of me that are in every movie that I've done. That to me is what my job is.

I'm aware that, from the outside, this looks like I've got quite an ego.

It's Hard to Stay Mad When There's So Much Beauty in the World

There's something very interesting about the way each individual actor approaches stuff.

My job as an actor is to serve the writing and help the author get his ideas across.

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

My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge, and, at least once a day, retiring to the men's room so I can jerk off while I fantasize about a life that doesn't so closely resemble Hell.

I think that when you put yourself, as actors have to do, in other people's shoes, when you have to put on the costume that someone else has worn in their life, it gets much, much harder to be prejudiced against them and even to be - to not try to look at the world in a sense of "I'm not going to judge somebody. I'm going to try to understand who they are and what they're about."

The legal profession, politics and acting are very closely tied: the whole point is to have an idea and get it across to a listener, whether it is one person or five thousand in a hall.

Being an actor sometimes requires that you ask yourself questions youd rather not know the answers to.

If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart; if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!

Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again and again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.

I always remember is that no matter how good I might be in a movie, I'll never be any better. It's frozen. But in theatre I can be better tomorrow night, I can be better the night after that and I can be better in a week. The journey you go through as an actor is incredible.

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

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making us believe that he's not real.

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

There are two things that have been happening over the last few decades in my opinion. First, there have been unbelievable, remarkable, pioneering advances in technology and, second, an equal amount of evolution in creativity. These two shifts are meeting at an intersection.

There are ways in which you can make sure that even if people come to the theatre because they know an actor or actress, by the end, theyve forgotten that, and they leave going, Wow - what an amazing play.

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.

It's a great thriller or mystery, but on another level it's a film about the fact that, if you only look at a person through one lens, or only believe what you're told, you can often miss the truth that is staring you in the face.

It's the way I feel about acting. That we are given clues by a writer about someone's essence or persona and it's our job to try to figure out which of those clues are true, which of clues we decide to follow and which of those clues we think are red herrings, or only in the way another character thinks of that character.