Top 380 Lee Quotes

I studied acting for 10 years before I went for an audition. I studied with Lee Strasberg and Actors Studio teachers, and went to the High School of Performing Arts.

I’m an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He’s somebody, along with Vincent Price, who I celebrate, and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre.

My mom and dad played this music all the time when I was growing up, so to me songs by Jerry Lee and Fats Domino are the classics, they’re the best songs ever.

When you’re a kid that’s spent all your pocket money buying Spider-Man comics, and then as an adult, you’re in the Marvel Universe, and you get to meet Stan Lee – it’s wonderful.

I’ve always loved the blues, John Lee Hooker, Janis Joplin, Hendrix.

I was a pretty fit and physical kid, and my first interest was in martial arts and kung fu with all the Bruce Lee movies.

I’ve been influenced by so many great people , like Sam Moore, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, so many great blues and soul artists that I completely revere. So it’s strange for me, actually, to hear somebody say, ‘Oh, I was deeply influenced by your music.’

I plug into a lot of old rock & roll. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis – I love all that stuff.

‘The Homesman’ is my third collaboration with Tommy Lee Jones as director, and each time, I am aware of how fortunate I am.

Growing up, my inspirations were Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, all these martial arts legends. I wanted to express my talent on screen in a certain way. I felt that it made me a little different.

A lot of my friends were mostly working in black-and-white – people like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and others. We would exchange prints with each other, and they were always very supportive of what I was doing.

The Best of Elvis Presley, Doris Day, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Hailey and the Comets, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Frankie Laine all topped the charts in the ’50s. Load a playlist of rock n’ roll royalty. You’re spoilt for choice.

If you like ‘The Nature of Things,’ or if you like ‘Quirks and Quarks’ you’ll certainly like Lee Smolin’s writing, and ‘Time Reborn’ is his latest nonfiction book, and it’s an absolutely compelling read. It’s worth the time.

We’d play the American bases and found all these wonderful records by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke. Without American music, there would not have been a British Invasion.

Everybody watches Bruce Lee. That’s a legend. He’s the man!

My theory in the ’90s was that I didn’t want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee ‘Sense and Sensibility’ was beautiful, but other ones, I didn’t think justice was being done. It’s not a slam dunk to adapt these books.

I hope Lee’s scandal isn’t real.

I only want to exist as a character. I don’t want people to think of the actor Lee Je-hoon when they see my roles.

I’ll make a diet cheesecake, but I’ll put it in a Sara Lee box. Or I’ll have a huge bowl of pasta, but it’s actually just a cup of pasta – the rest is vegetables. It makes me feel less deprived.

I think Ang Lee is a very, very talented director. He used martial arts to talk about love and girl, you know… But Zhang Yimou tried to use martial arts film to talk about Chinese culture, Chinese people. What do they think, what do they want and what do they hope the world will become.

They didn’t have the money to keep Christopher Lee long enough to play his scenes with me.

I was a big fan of martial arts movies – Bruce Lee in particular, as cringeworthy as it is. Jean-Claude van Damme was a big inspiration as well – it’s a little embarrassing.

Someone like Vincent Price or somebody like Christopher Lee, they never won an award, and it doesn’t matter. They’re cool.

I used to love, and I still do, Lee Ann Womack. And Alison Krauss. I mean, how many Grammys does she have? She’s just remained solid and true and great, and I respect that.

I wish I were tall, like my friend Lee Kwang Soo.

In the film industry, we tend to pick up where others have left off, and I’d like to think the influences I picked up from Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme are visible in my work.

I have an acting crush on Gene Hackman; I have an acting crush on Tommy Lee Jones. Gary Cooper. Jimmy Cagney. Michael Gambon. Simon Russell Beale.

Bruce Lee was an artist and, like him, I try to go beyond the fundamentals of my sport. I want the public to see a knockout in the making.

Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.

I had attraction to work with Ang Lee. I wanted to work with him.

Director Lee Chang-dong’s 1997 noir ‘Green Fish.’ I was attending middle school when I first watched the piece. And although I could not completely understand the film and where it was getting at, I still found it extremely powerful.

I read ‘Sabella or The Blood Stone’ by Tanith Lee, which was hugely influential to me. I love Tanith’s writing. She’s just really lyrical, beautiful use of language.

Spike Lee is one of my biggest influences. What I love about Spike, other than he’s just a fun guy to hang around, is that Spike is fearless. As much as people talk about him being politically outspoken, let’s not forget that he’s one of the best screenwriters, ever, in addition to being a visual master.

The moment we finished shooting for ‘Bruce Lee,’ my wife Upasana reminded of a pending holiday.

Spike Lee is openly contemptuous of whites and what he implies to be a white establishment out to get him. Lee’s films have grossed in the hundreds of millions. Whites have contributed greatly to this sum, though he seemingly cannot stand them. Hypocritical?

Lee is such a brilliant rival. I treasure the opportunities we have to play each other.

Writers of all things speculative have played in alternate and parallel worlds for a long time – everyone from Stephen King to Philip Pullman to Tanith Lee – and it’s an obsession that likely isn’t going away any time soon.

I’d travel to Alfreton for games, and my dad, Lee, would drive. I’d eat my pre-match meal in the back. Mam would make chicken and pasta, and she’d stick it in a tub.

Spike Lee is not the first name you would probably think about redoing ‘Oldboy.’

I love Malcolm Lee and jumped on the opportunity to work with him as a director.

There’s a whole network of people, particularly in New York, obviously, that came up through the Spike Lee School. I’m one of them. That’s big!

General Lee, this is no place for you. These men behind you are Georgians and Virginians. They have never failed you and will not fail you here. Will you boys?

Lee Marvin was my godfather and a very close friend of my father’s. My father directed the very successful ‘Point Blank’ in which Lee Marvin starred.

The incurably suspicious Arthur Lee, youngest brother of Richard Henry, was of opinion that what others termed ‘errors’ in the Constitution were a deliberate scheme to create an oligarchy.

Lee Dam is a character who expresses her feelings honestly. I thought we had a lot in common and I’ve always wanted to play a confident character like her.

I could be hit by a Sara Lee truck tomorrow. Which is not a bad way of going: ‘Richard Simmons Found in a Freeway in Pound Cake and Fudge, With a Smile on His Face.’ Let’s face it. We don’t know anything.

Our love of kung fu goes back to the Bruce Lee days in the 1970s. Outside the action, we loved the interesting, heartfelt stories and the dialogue. It was RZA’s idea to draw all that in there as samples.

I love Tom Wilkinson and Tommy Lee Jones as well as Jessica Chastain. But the person I look up to most, not because I identify with her roles but because of who she is as a person, is Sissy Spacek.

Will and Tommy Lee are the only actors I’ve ever worked with where neither of them want to say any lines.

Looking back at my school reports, I start off as quite a swotty kid, and then when I get to 12 or 13, my teachers start saying: ‘Lee has started to joke around a lot in class.’ After that, it’s a steady graph of decline, with the jokes increasing and increasing.

The myth-making about Appomattox started from the moment Lee left the courthouse on his horse to travel to Richmond.

We saw David Carradine, who is not of Asian descent, playing an Asian man on the show ‘Kung Fu’ that originally should have, and was developed for, Bruce Lee. To have that be the legacy that quote-unquote inspired ‘Shang-Chi’ in the beginning obviously doesn’t put us off to a great start.

Liberace – or Lee, as us friends called him – was great. He was gay, you know.

I like movies made by Spike Lee – doing those films out of the U.S., that is really daring.

There was a subtlety about Peggy Lee. It was powerful. There was a valuable use of space. Everything was not cluttered. Her voice was out front and was the key instrument.

I remember when I was a kid, I’d watch ‘Kung Fu Theater’ on TV, and all the movies would star guys named things like ‘Bruce Lai’ – you’d never get the real Bruce Lee films. So when I finally saw ‘Enter the Dragon,’ I was like, ‘Holy cow, who is this guy?’