Robert Carlyle Quotes

I've really enjoyed my work in television, but the problem for me is the turnover of directors every week.

I rant and rave about noise pollution.

Acting, the arts in general, is a magnet for the wounded of society.

It's much more fun to be ugly.

I'd totally be attracted to a geek girl!

I owe my father everything.

I want to keep audiences off balance, so they don't know who I am or how to take me. If I duck and weave, as Frank Bruno might say, I'll have a longer shelf life.

I do tend to divide my childhood into darkness and light, and the first seven years were certainly the darkness.

I've always believed that as an actor anything you're asked to do is within you. You just have to try and find it.

Hunger's a great spur.

I used to be a rabid reader, but now it's scripts or nothing - network television is quite relentless, and you can't drop the ball.

I'm in four different films this year, and I have four different accents. I sound different in every film. You have to love a character to play it well, and change in my work is what I want.

When I look back at my past and the way I grew up, I grew up on communes. That was meant to be.

In the late '70s, maybe just before I started, there was still an attitude that if you did film you didn't do TV and vice versa, but that's gone now.

Guys, particularly in the West, go to the gym and train for hours and hours to pick up something that is heavier than them. Why would you want to do that?

Biologically, I'm lucky - an angular face and dark colouring which shows up well on camera.

At times of the severest depression, humor is what binds people together.

I never rehearse. Never! I think it's a waste of time.

I think you should only wear jewellery if it has a story behind it.

I've never been good at accepting jobs six months down the line. I can't do it. If I'm thinking about this, I can't think about that. So I always seem to fly by the seat of my pants.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

Acting is probably the greatest therapy in the world. You can get a lot stuff out of you on the set so you don't have to take it home with you at night. It's the stuff between the lines, the empty space between those lines which is interesting.

I never go anywhere without my iPod.

For me, it's a voyage of self-discovery. I'm able to go on a set and to explore situations, personalities, people and characters that are close to me, or maybe not. Through going there and experiencing these different people and their situations, it helps me to get oriented and develop as a human being. So, acting is fundamental to who I am.

I hate the word 'hippy.'

I don't take a great deal of interest in party politics. Social politics interests me a great deal more.

I often have scripts sent to me with allegedly Scottish characters where I end up telling them, 'You're going to have to rethink this whole thing!

My dad was rubbish at all other aspects of his financial life, but he's pretty good at paying the rent.

A lot of my work is with children and there's a reason for that, because they really level you.

Acting is a really insular thing.

Bullying is a terrible, terrible thing.

I played a maniac fan who murders a policeman and she did my makeup. I thought anyone interested in me looking like that must have genuinely liked me.

I loved cinema while growing up and, for the longest time, wanted to be a director.

A lot of the characters I play have problems, they are marginalised, they have serious psychological problems, problems with relationships, with childhood. These are big subjects, big subjects. You can't balk at work like that. As an actor, that's as good as it gets.

My wife was a make-up artist, and she's a total product junkie. Our bathroom is packed full of lotions and potions so I end up trying them out.

I love sci-fi because it leads in the imagination, and I always say it has the most intelligent fans in the world.

I think I have a natural, if I can say that, got a kind of natural ability in comedy.

The thing I miss the most about Scotland is the football.

There's a kind of unwritten rule: Don't say anything at all, and everything will be fine. It's a producer's medium. The directors aren't there to make any decisions. They're not going to change anything.

I have a reputation for being an improvisational actor, which is true, but I also know what I'm doing so that if the improvisational strand doesn't work I can go back to what I know's already there.

The darker the character, the more interesting.

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I am a very patriotic guy, in terms of my Scottishness and my roots.

I feel like I'm the luckiest man on the planet.

Anyone that knows me knows what I'm about, and I'm very much a British actor, a European actor.

I'd love to do a Columbo-type detective character in a series.

A lot of Scots have settled in Canada over the years and it's a very easy place for Scots - they understand us, we understand them.

I don't want to be a luvvie actor. It took a long time for me to accept I was an actor, a professional actor, and that, actually, I make a living out of this.

In troubled times the last thing you want to do is to stick your money into a film. It's such a gamble.

Most of the time, you find that the smaller the budget, the more the project is about something substantive.

So many of my friends, old friends I haven't seen in years, made their way out there and got lost, then found their way back. That seems believable to me.