Rob Lowe Quotes

I wouldn't go back on my old days, though; everybody needs to have their wild years. It's just a question of when and I'd rather have had them early than be doing it as a mid-life crisis type thing.

Can someone explain the vitriol whenever Ayn Rand comes up? 'Atlas' is the greatest motivator for the individual that I can imagine.

Sampling, statisticians have told us, is a much more effective way of getting a good census.

I was sick of playing high-school kids. I liked being a teenager, but I would not go back for all the tea in China.

The '80s were about trying to establish myself as an actor with a career. And being a teenager enjoying the fruits of being successful with lots of what I think is appropriate for that age.

Be funny whenever possible, even if some people don't get it.

Sobriety was the greatest gift I ever gave myself. I don't put it on a platform. I don't campaign about it. It's just something that works for me. It enabled me to really connect with another human being - my wife, Sheryl - which I was never able to do before.

We always reminisce about how everyone tried to get Diane Lane's attention, to very little success.

I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What’s called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary.

Sobriety was the greatest gift I ever gave myself.

Fake confidence on the outside often trumps truthful turmoil on the inside.

People have a responsibility, especially with today's media, to read between the lines.

Adventure is important in life. Making memories matters. It doesn’t have to be a secret sea plane and an historic sports moment. But to have a great life, you need great memories. Grab any intriguing offer. Say yes to a challenge, and to the unknown. Be creative in adding drama and scope to your own life. Work at it, like a job. Money from effort comes and goes. But effort from imagination and following adventure creates stories that you keep forever. And anyone can do it.

They (teenage boys)don’t really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation.

You show me someone who's led a perfect life and I'll show you a dullard.

I think it was Alfred Hitchcock who said 90 percent of successful moviemaking is in the casting. The same is true in life. Who you are exposed to, who you choose to surround yourself with, is a unique variable in all of our experiences and it is hugely important in making us who we are. Seek out interesting characters, tough adversaries and strong mentors and your life can be rich, textured, highly entertaining and successful, like a Best Picture winner. Surround yourself with dullards, people of vanilla safety and unextraordinary ease, and you may find your life going straight to DVD.

[The Outsiders] was very competitive, in the best possible way. Full of love, full of companionship and fellowship, pranks and practical jokes and ball-busting.

So I came to the realization: Nothing in life is unfair. It's just life.

Directors are not worried about casting beautiful women, but they are not sure that they want to cast great-looking men. My looks have prevented people from seeing my work objectively.

We all have a suspicion and hope that we've just been part of something special, something that may eventually change our lives. That no one else knows this makes it seem like we are living with a secret that we would like to share, but can't, sort of like having a superpower that's not come online or being president elect. For the moment, our lives proceed as usual, but within a month, we think, everything will change. It's a frustrating, if exciting, disconnect.

Any time an opportunity scares you that much, you should seriously consider saying yes.

I don't look back with any bitterness, though there are a couple of judgment calls and some '80s hairdos that I'd like to do over.

The umbrella that I live under is that you must be truthful with everyone except when to do so would injure them or others.

[J.F] Kennedy's own accent was inconsistent. So people are inconsistent. And it always kind of irks me when people talk about inconsistent accents, because people are imperfect by nature. So in the end, what you do is, you do an inhabitation and not an imitation.

I have been looking forward to this age of my life for a long time. In my twenties, I marked the days on the calendar - I was sick of playing high-school kids.

There's this unbelievable bias and prejudice against quote-unquote good-looking people, that they can't be in pain or they can't have rough lives or be deep or interesting.

I like the tradition of ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances and how they react to events which force them to be heroic in a way that is not in their natures.

I have a lot of great memories, but I can't imagine anything more exciting than the life I have now.

Mostly people are interested in how somebody becomes an actor. And then, if they've had a couple of drinks, they want to know what Demi Moore's like or whatever. I mean, I don't mind people asking that at all, but when you've answered it five times...

There is good and evil in each of us, and you can easily be led to the dark side.

I have other obligations now - the show, my family, my life... though I know that without my sobriety I wouldn't have any of those things.

['John F. Kennedy] movie is based on a massive best-selling book, which is always helpful. And then the script was amazing and answered my question, "Why this? Why now?" And the "why now" is that it's 50 years since the assassination, and the country needs to have and will have a conversation about that. And the "why this" is the construct, which I think is sort of ingenious.

I think part of maturity is knowing who you are.

I think that in today's world the right to privacy and freedom of the press are set on a collision course.

Conventions are, by nature, a party. I mean, that's why people become delegates. They come from all over the world to exercise their democratic rights and to party.

I'll be sober ten years and married nine soon.

When I was a teen idol, I was so goddamn pretty I wouldn't have taken myself seriously.

You can meet people who are really beautiful. Then, when you see them angry for the first time, all of a sudden they're not beautiful anymore. They didn't just step into the other room and have plastic surgery; they're still the same physically. It's just that something inside of them has changed. They're no longer attractive.

All the shows we did pre-airdate, and I'd come out - "Rob Lowe!" - and it was [Offers bored applause.] After the show aired? I came out - "Rob Lowe!" - and the place was, like, bedlam. And then the next week, they wouldn't let anyone under the age of 20 into the audience. And I'm going, "So that's how it works! Okay!"

You would not believe the amount of feedback I've gotten over people binge-watching The West Wing. Most of them have binge-watched it countless times.

Kids are growing up and they don't know the difference between fact and fiction. The line is getting blurry. I can handle it, you know; I'm a big boy. And the entertainment industry has always been crazy. But the problem is, it spills over into some very serious issues, in politics and real newsworthy stuff.

What people do in their private lives is their business, and shouldn't be anybody else's business.

We knew we were doing something that would make an impact, because of Francis [Ford Coppola], but I don't think we were surprised by how well the movie [The Outsiders] did, but I think we would all say we were surprised at how well we all did coming out of it.

Of the many horrors of divorce, the most egregious is that it robs a kid of the best of both worlds. Dads can do many things that even the best moms can't, and vice versa.

[Doctor Cukrowicz] was basically a role where you have two diva actresses - Maggie Smith and Natasha Richardson - and my role was to say, "And then what happened? Tell me more." But I wanted to do it was because a) it was Tennessee Williams, a great writer, and b) it was Richard Eyre, an amazing director. And to work with those two amazing women!

Show me someone who doesn't have some sort of experience that they would be uncomfortable for people to know about and I'll show you a dullard.

Nothing in life is unfair. It's just life. To the extent that I had any inner turmoil, I had only myself to blame. I also thought of my two boys and what kind of example I hoped to be. I would always want them to take charge of their own futures and not be paralyzed by the comfort and certainty of the status quo or be cowed by the judgment of those on the outside looking in.

We [me,Maggie Smith and Natasha Richardson ] rehearsed [Suddenly, Last Summer] like a play for a month, and then we shot it over the course of... I believe it was 10 days. All live, basically. Long, uninterrupted takes. And for me, a lot of it is me going head to head with Maggie Smith. And anybody who's ever had that opportunity never forgets it! It's a real career highlight, and it was everything I ever thought it would be, and more.

The best part is not the biggest, it's the one that's most memorable.

Intelligence is that aspect of human cognition that we haven't managed to emulate yet.