Thomas McDonell Quotes

When I was in high school, I wasn't a troublemaker. I didn't get in fights. I was a good student and I had a lot of friends.

I mean, I like nice girls, and I like people who are generous.

I went to a school in N.Y. that is conceptual and interdisciplinary and modeled after Cal Arts. It is not just painting or sculpture; it was everything mixed together.

Going to the office of some stranger and waiting in a line, in a hallway, with five other guys who look just like you, waiting your turn to go in and embarrass yourself, and then waiting around for feedback, which never comes. I really like that. For a young artist, it seems like the perfect thing to be doing, humiliation, over and over and over and over. Which I'm sure can't be the way that some people look at it, but I thought that was so great. The point of it is if you make your own stuff you don't have to deal with other people's bullshit.

Well, it's really important to be honest with the person that you're seeing.

The cliché about young actors is that they want to diversify the work that they do to show their range, but it's true. Or at least, for me, I want to keep doing different stuff; doing different work, you see different things.

You really see that the art world bends over for Hollywood sometimes, in this way that is really grotesque, and the other way around doesn't happen, which is too bad, especially if you consider yourself an artist, and that's what you care about, to see the people you admire and think about the most acting weird.

The time is a thing; you don't have so much time. A good trick is to try and think about a way to use material from one occupation for the other. It's like going through working a day job, this is so dumb to say, but you know how Julian Schnabel made those crockery paintings while he was working as a short-order cook? It's like that, using what is around, transforming that to create meaning and make art. Trying to take nothing and make... something.

The truth is, I don't really have a type of girl.

I wasn't into acting when I was a kid. Maybe because I was shy or it didn't occur to me.

I think there are certain technical things about acting that change between working in film and television. Everything definitely slows down and we have more time in film.