Rainn Wilson Quotes

Dwight is a sad clown. You've seen those paintings of sad clown.

There was one point in high school actually when I was on the chess team, marching band, model United Nations and debate club all at the same time. And I would spend time with the computer club after school. And I had just quit pottery club, which I was in junior high, but I let that go.

The making of art is no different than prayer.

I know what I look like - a weird, sad clown puppet. I'm fine with that.

The great thing about 'The Office' and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.

Well, Dwight was born to be No. 2 and I don't think he would know what to do as a leader. But he loves following. He would have made a great fascist.

Everyone is an artist. Everyone is creative in their own way and that that creativity is a great thing. It's a human thing and it needs to be nurtured and it can help us go down life's path and help us to become deeper, richer, more satisfied human beings.

I joined an acting class in my junior year in high school. I'd always wanted to try it.

Not everything is a lesson. Sometimes you just fail.

This is one doodle that can't be un-did, Homeskillet.

I was raised to think about philosophy and religious thought and the soul and the spirit of humankind in a different way, also really socially progressive teachings of the Baha'i faith, the equality of men and women, the elimination of racial prejudice, the equality of science and religion, so it was a big cauldron of big ideas in my household. And we were weird and unhappy family, but nonetheless that was a really positive thing that came out of it.

And I do believe that the way to change a society, to uplift people - not just their spirit, but to uplift their society and economic base - is through education.

There's like ten minutes when it's like, 'Okay, wait, who is this guy again?' And then, you know, I just put on the calculator watch and the glasses, and just be all, you know, inappropriate. And then it just works out fine.

I think God has a tremendous sense of humor.

My body has been making women laugh for the last 20 years and I'm happy to continue to oblige.

I was doing great plays. It wasn't changing the world. I was getting good agents and doing film and TV and I wasn't happier. I was like "Wow, there is an unease inside of me." And that led me back on my kind of more spiritual path to the Baha'i faith in a new and fresher way and I came to also understand at that point that there was no difference between being devout and being an artist. There is no difference between creativity and spirituality and philosophy and that is what Soul Pancake, the book, and SoulPancake.com are about is: it's all about human expression and it's about seeking to transcend.

Music is universal too. Even deaf people like to dance, love rhythm, and can kind of pick it up.

I found it very easy to transform into creeps and weirdos and losers and goof-balls, and I'm happy to play eccentric kinds of characters, and I have a great affinity for the outsider, but I definitely am about expanding my range as well.

I was a total dork in high school.

I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books.

I use two million Twitter followers as a tool. The reason I have Twitter is so people can get to know me as a different person other than Dwight. I just realized all of the sudden like everything thinks I'm Dwight. They think that I'm Dwight from the office and that I'm this kind of annoying, difficult, nerdy, creepy guy and they don't know Rainn Wilson - although I'm a little bit nerdy, annoying and creepy. I'm not as much as Dwight Schrute.

If you cloned JFK and Abraham Lincoln and made them president it wouldn't matter. Our system is just too corrupt and too broken. I think that science is corrupt and broken. I think health and nutrition. I think the economic systems, the international relations, the environment, everything, the engines of everything are broken.

My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time. He was always so frustrated having to work to support the family that I was like, I'm never going to do that. I don't want to just be working a menial job to support my family and dreaming of being an artist. We learn from our fathers in that way.

Absolutely father knows best, always do what your fathers say, and if you can't find one then just ask me, I am a father and I know best.

The Baha'i celebrity, or the Belebrity, is a character actor with a big head playing an annoying creep on a TV show.

When I was a little kid I loved the Marx brothers and discovered Monty Python when I was 10 or 11-years-old. I used to take a tape recorder and hold it up in front of the TV to record entire episodes to play over and over again, so that I could memorise it.

Creativity is absolutely for everyone. I firmly believe this. I think if you're the driest accountant with the plastic pocket pen protector it's in how you interact with the world. There is artistry in everything that we do and there is expression in everything that we do.

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

I grew up watching comedy. It was among all the geeky things that I did.

I really like the stuff that is very absurd and very real at the same time. I think Anton Chekhov is the greatest comedy writer of all time. I think he would make a great addition to The Office staff. If you look through Chekhov plays there is a lot of awkward pauses in there. His mixture of pathos, absurdity, truthfulness and whimsy is just mixed together perfectly.

I think we're the only jokeless show on television. I mean really, we have no setups and no punch lines. It's not a joke show. There are funny lines and funny moments but again the comedy is born of the human experience and awkward pauses are a great part of what it is to be human.

I used to play a lot of chess and competitive chess and study chess and as you get to the grandmasters and learn their styles when you start copying their games like the way they express themselves through... The way Kasparov or Bobby Fischer expresses themselves through a game of chess is it's astonishing. You can show a chess master one of their games and they'll say "Yeah, that is done by that player."

What's interesting is the show allows for the awkward pauses to be captured, which makes it stylistically unique, especially for American audiences.

In every decade rock and roll starts to get very serious and navel gazing and kind of self serious and every once and a while it kind of needs a kick in the pants.

I think Dwight loves being number two. I don't think he has any desire to be number one. He wants to be number two no matter where he goes. It's like Avis. 'We try harder.' That's Dwight.

I think definitely people know me from playing creeps and weirdos, and I'm definitely looking to expand my range.

I came to realize I did believe in God. I couldn't conceive of a universe without someone overseeing it in a compassionate way.

Scotland is the Canada of England!

I like being a Baha'i who has an out-there sense of humor. God gives us talents and faculties, and making people laugh is one of mine.

I think that charity is a tricky thing, because a lot of times, people equate charity with handouts. I don't believe in handouts.

[Internet] technology, like anything else that mankind creates is a tool and that tool can be used for good or for evil, like a light saber. Technology is supposed to bring people together, streamline things and make life easier and in a lot of ways it does that. However, technology can also disconnect you from other people and break down the social network, the real social network of family and friends and interpersonal communication, and isolate people, make them feel alone, make them feel small. So it's a tool that needs to be used correctly.

Some of the most morally conscious, kindest, most compassionate people are in the entertainment industry, people who want to affect the world and make it a better place through telling human, heartfelt stories.

The camera adds ten pounds and ten thousand dollars.

I like playing misfits, I like playing oddballs, I like playing characters with rough edges.

I'm lucky to have a wife and a child that keep me grounded.

I want to keel over on stage playing King Lear at age 99 or something like that.

Our society is all about focusing on the externals, "These people like me, I'm successful because of these people, they view me as being good" and we need to take that vision and instead of expanding it outwards we need to look inside ourselves.

People are flawed. I like peaking into their flaws. The way to humanize them is not to play them in any general way, but to make them very specific. If you make them specific, they have hopes and dreams and loves and vulnerabilities and quirks and you get to know them and you get to appreciate them.

A guy may wear a suit and have a high-paying job and appear very mature, but essentially, he's a 14-year-old boy.

We've seen that there are a lot of people out there - teenagers in Topeka, housewives in Long Island, millionaire Internet start-up moguls - that all want to connect with each other about what it is to be human.