Matthew Modine Quotes

We should all aspire in life to do a multitude of things well - to be a great father, to be a good husband, to be a good lover, you know, to try to do things the best you can is very important to me.

Photography is about light and what it does and how it is captured on a piece of negative.

I don't think that digital photography is romantic yet. It's not sympathetic the way that film is.

Stanley didn't shy away from true humanity or from the ugliness that all people are capable of.

Real spiritual journey in life is the discovery of self. I think once you take all the religious bullshit away from Jesus Christ, it's saying it's about this journey of discovering who you are, and what's really important in life is simply love. That the journey of civilization, the journey of understanding, is forgiveness, is empathy. And that's what humanity is striving for.

It was the baseball fantasy of a lifetime - to be able to sit on the bench with all those professional athletes. I got to take my son along because I wasn't sure I would be able to play with them.

My father taught me to paint when I was young with watercolors and so I learned at a very young age the essential elements of the value of light and composition.

The experience of using a Rolleiflex camera is very different than using a SLR.

I played Little League and in high school. I played more over the years whenever there was a pick-up game... usually softball.

You hope and pray that you'll get involved with a director that you understand and who has the same sensibility as you do and knows how to push you and bring out the best in you.

If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.

For example, Michael Mann's film Collateral - there is certain kinds of stories that lend themselves to digital photography. Some things are very raw stories that digital photography kind of lends itself to.

They don't have the news media set up in Africa that we do in the United States, where televisions are so accessible and newspapers and magazines are able to educate people.

I've worked with Robert Altman a couple of times too.

Think of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. They used the same actors over and over again.

Life really is very brief.

I never set out to be rich and famous. I wanted to follow my own path.

Imagine if somebody were to really sit down with Osama bin Ladin and say, 'Listen man, what is it that you're so angry at me about that you're willing to have people strap bombs to themselves, or get inside of airplanes and fly them into buildings?' That would be the miracle if we can get, sit down and talk to our enemies and find a way for them to hear us.

You know what the problem is? You can't put a woman into a man's role. A women's journey in life, I'm not speaking disrespectfully of women and their roles in life, but a woman's journey in life is very different from a man's. That doesn't mean a woman can't do a man's job, but it doesn't mean that a woman should do a man's job the way a man handles it. The things that men question themselves about in life are quite different from the things women question themselves about.

When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

When you're young, you get by on charm and good looks, not that I miss being charming or good-looking, but then you start to understand things about life, about the craft of acting. You approach it a different way. It's much more fun now than it was, because you take more chances and risks. I enjoy acting now more than when I was young.

Fifteen dollar too beaucoup. Five dollars each... Five dollars is all my mom allows me to spend.

Everything is so convenient in New York.

I always thought that it was kind of silly that a baseball card could be worth so much money.

And if I was going to go there – the only person you can really compare Batman to, of those characters, would be Iron Man, another rich guy who has the ability to make fantastic toys – so if you want to take Batman and Iron Man and put them in a battle, that’s an interesting battle. But if you want to take Christian Bale and Robert Downey Jr. and put them in a UFC fighting cage, Christian Bale will – to quote Full Metal Jacket – tear Robert Downey Jr.’s head off and sh-t down his neck.

There's a discipline. When you take someone's portrait, you don't have to take 50 photographs, just find that one so that when you release the shutter, that's the image that you took.

So the thing that's beautiful about the Rolleiflex is that I open the camera up from the top and put my face in and that the camera's all about composition and all about light.