Quotes by Kevin Spacey

We gotta be willing to let it hurt. You know, all this notion that acting is “yeah it’s pretend” and yes we enjoy it and yeah we can have a good time with it. But if you wanna LAND, you wanna make an impact, you want those FUCKERS TO REMEMBER YOU! Then you have to let it hurt sometimes. You gotta get there because that’s all an audience ever wants. Is for you to open up your chest and show them that you have a fucking heart. That’s all we want. A heart. A human being. Not an affectation.

Edward Norton and I have known each other awhile. I just think hes the real deal, supremely talented and smart. Hes got a great sense of humor.

After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley.

My mother always, always, always thought that I was going to be famous. Thought that I was going to win Oscars. In fact, I believe I accepted the Oscar as a ketchup bottle many a time in front of my mother in the kitchen. Id like to thank the Academy, I said with a ketchup bottle.

I certainly identify with the role of mentor and, to some degree, maybe teacher. I do a lot of work with kids at the Old Vic.

Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get.

If you havent turned rebel by twenty youve got no heart if you havent turned establishment by thirty youve got no brains!

I like being able to go to a local pub and have great food and particularly love pubs that welcome my dogs.

There are ways in which you can make sure that even if people come to the theatre because they know an actor or actress, by the end, theyve forgotten that, and they leave going, Wow - what an amazing play.

As long as we, in the United States, continue to insist that our politicians have to spend all of their time raising millions of dollars for television ads, it will be corrupt. If we leave it up to the politicians to clean up lobbying and finance reform, nothing is going to change.

Its a great thriller or mystery, but on another level its a film about the fact that, if you only look at a person through one lens, or only believe what youre told, you can often miss the truth that is staring you in the face.

Whether thats positive or not, people are talking about the Old Vic Theater again with passion and commitment and controversy and debate.

Maybe there are people who are gamers who havent seen movies I have made, or the movies I have made have made no impression on them at all.

My mother was sarcastic and delightful and, trust me, quite remarkable.

I have long been a supporter of The Princes Trust, and so when American Express asked me to launch Amex Be Inspired and help young people build their confidence and fulfil their potential, I was delighted to get involved.

While the sciences are hugely important, let us not leave behind a childs imagination.

Partisan rancour and party politics and ideology have got in the way of compromise - and compromise is the only thing that has ever made politics successful.

I find it sad that by not talking about who I sleep with, that makes me mysterious. There was a time when I would have been called a gentleman.

Its always the big question in our lives if you have a lot of success. What do you do with it? Buy more houses, buy more cars, buy more stuff, be wealthy and distant and unengaged? Or do you take all that good fortune that has come towards you and spread the love, do something with it?

The relationship with the cast has everything to do with how a performance develops, and in a sense that while youre discovering a play in the course of rehearsal with the director, youre also discovering it with your fellow actors. Were all in it together.