Top 30 David Morse Quotes

There’s been one movie star that would not work with me because of my height. I had so many people who had to stand on boxes when they do scenes with me.

I gave up planning when our children were born, when I had three children to feed and a roof to keep over our head and all of that. Early in my career, I said I would never do television at all; then I wound up doing nothing but television for 10 years when I did ‘St. Elsewhere’ and all those TV movies.

My first summer at a repertory theater, I was making $20 a week. I was making a living, as far as I was concerned, and I was doing theater. And next season, I made $40 a week. But I don’t think anyone in my family would have considered that making a living.

I’ve had the chance to work with Christopher Plummer, one of the great stage and film actors, a couple of times, including on ‘Prototype,’ the first TV movie I ever did. It was science fiction in the Ray Bradbury sense, written by the famous team who created Columbo, Levinson, and Link.

I was involved with some great things in television that I could never have done in film.

I have a DVD player and I have DVDs, and I have no time to watch any of them.

In high school, I tried out for every sport there was. But none of them would have me. When I was a freshman, someone asked me to go audition for a play with them. I got in and didn’t want to do anything else for the next four years.

I’ve always tried to not let movie, television or theatre be all that my life is about. I’ve always tried to get involved in the community or my family now I have kids.

I had the great good fortune of working with Christopher Plummer, Frances Sternhagen, and Arthur Hill early in my career, and it set a standard for the kind of work I want to do.

I try to do things I haven’t been able to before.

Just in terms of when I got the script, the character I probably liked the least was Big Foster. Because even though he was central to the story and to that world, he was really written to be kind of a brute, a pig, a completely black-and-white bad guy.

I don’t care about the money. I just need, as an actor, to do as many different things that I can to make me feel good about myself.

I had almost no money, but with the little bit I had, I got a ticket to see ‘That Championship Season’ at the Booth theater.

I’m acting for the pleasure of it.

I will be always grateful to NBC.

Part of the problem when I was doing ‘How I Learned to Drive’ is I would see my kids one night a week for six months, and that was just too hard. We moved to Philadelphia after we lost our house in the earthquake, the ’94 Northridge earthquake.

‘Outsiders,’ I guess, is sort of dark, but I don’t really think of it as dark. The world up there on that mountain, it had the potential to have a lot of fun as well as a lot of drama, these guys raiding the town in their ATVs with their tattoos. It seemed like something different.

As actors, we often look for the scene, big moments that say, ‘This is why you have to do this role.’

Because I’d only done theater, that’s really what I thought most of my life would be. I always figured that movies would be a part of it at some point. I didn’t know how or when.

I was a teenager and it was tough years for me. Being able to bring myself into a character and live in somebody else’s world was so important for me emotionally. I couldn’t express things well in my normal life. I was so overwhelmed by my emotions.

With repertory, you had to play all these different characters. The range of roles is really what I fell in love with, every night getting to become somebody different. That was my idea of acting, getting to be part of the company and a family.

Home wasn’t a pleasant place to live, growing up.

In my first film, I was a basketball player. Like every good actor, I lied when they asked me if I could play.

No matter how many people tell you, Save your money, when you’ve got a series, you never do. Somehow it doesn’t seem important. Maybe it’s because you’ve been without money for so long as an actor.

To this day, that’s what I love the most: finding and playing characters who are out of my experience.

Big Foster is a guy who was in line to be the head of this clan that’s been up in the mountains for 200 years, because his father was the leader or the Bren’in, his mother is now Bren’in, and they’re kind of royalty, so he was in line to be next. He’d been promised it from a young age, but it just hasn’t happened.

I’ve done scenes in films that I felt like the performance was better in certain takes, but they couldn’t use them because it didn’t match what the person was doing when they came around and the camera was on them.

It’s great to be able to have your feet in both worlds. I wouldn’t want to be just stuck in one or the other.

I don’t like talking about myself. I’m not really interested in myself. One of the good things about being a supporting actor is that you get to talk about other people.

Everything is interesting to me.