Top 45 J. K. Simmons Quotes

A lot of the stuff about white-supremacist groups was very family-friendly: ‘We just love our people.’ One the surface, you go, ‘Gee, what’s wrong with loving your people?’ But when you love your people to the exclusion of everything else that’s remotely different, that’s when you get into trouble.

I’m just first of all looking for a part that’s well written and speaks to me.

I am who I am. I have a low voice, and I look like somebody’s dad or boss or a police chief, and those roles come my way.

It’s nice to be number one on the call sheet.

Things heal. Bad stuff happens, but you go on. Life takes care of it.

If you are lucky enough to have a parent or two alive on this planet, call them. Don’t text; don’t e-mail. Call them on the phone.

Everybody does their homework, and we all come together and just knock it out. There are adjustments to make, and if you have actors who are collaborators and who really know how to listen and be in the scene together, than it works out beautifully.

It’s OK to turn down stuff that isn’t really interesting and spend the summer with my family.

Almost every character I’ve ever played – and sometimes this is very conscious and sometimes it’s not – I need to find what they love.

After the second and final time that I got hugely fat in my life and when I lost that weight six or seven years ago, I pretty much decided that I was going to stay in decent shape for the rest of my life.

I read ‘Whiplash,’ and I wanted to do it.

In lean times, you get plenty of sleep, and you’re not flying around everywhere.

My aunt was so attuned to commercials that she could always identify the voiceover actor.

I’ve been your yellow M&M for, oh, at least two decades or so, and I’ve done a lot of other animated stuff in between.

Screaming is hard after a while.

We’re raising a generation of kids who are being overly praised for incredibly minor accomplishments. I think it’s counter-productive.

I play tons of authority figures, whether it’s the dad or the cop or the boss. I think it’s a combination of how I look, who I am.

When I got out of college, I moved to Seattle because it was the nearest big city and still didn’t know if I wanted to be a composer, conductor, singer, actor. I just got day jobs and auditioned and took what came, and the theater doors were the ones opening the most.

I was not a giant comic book fan as a kid, but to the extent that I did read comics, Spider-Man was always my favorite guy.

I don’t respond to authority figures who abuse their authority.

I wasn’t a comic book aficionado at all when I was a kid, but my cousin Weed was. Every time we went to visit him on the farm, he had two really fun things: comedy albums and comic books.

I read a lot of scripts, and there’s a lot of good writing and a lot of OK writing and a lot of crappy writing. And even with the really good writing, it doesn’t necessarily speak to me.

I had many, many mentors that I worked with. Music teachers, choir directors, directors in summer stock or in regional theater. You know, people I was able to work with repeatedly and learn from who were really sort of appropriate people for me to work with at a given time in my development as an actor.

I actually have a degree in music and was aware that music was a tool used in therapy. I didn’t realize how far it had come since I was in college in the mid-seventies.

I like to stay home. I don’t want to be away shooting in Europe for six or eight months at a stretch.

If the awards buzz is happening, and it’s coming from critics and people in the business and all of that, that’s only more good news.

If you’re doing a prison show, HBO is the absolute best place in the world to be doing that because you’re not going to have to do all that, you know, ‘Prison Break’ stuff where you can’t really behave and speak like people do in a maximum-security prison.

I don’t think I’ve ever watched a movie to prepare for a role.

Generally, if I read something that I think is really good and that I feel a connection with and is right for me, I see and hear who the guy is, as manifested by me.

I do respond well to a director, a teacher – someone who doesn’t accept mediocrity.

The retired L.A.P.D. motor cops who work set security now, all wear the same uniform, they’re great guys with great stories, and they’re great at their job, providing security on sets.

Music has become so ever-present in our lives. You can’t walk through a shopping mall or go into a restaurant without what we used to call Muzak.

I come from a family of educators. My sister is a college teacher. My dad is a college teacher, but first a junior high teacher.

For me, if the words are good on the page, the rest of it comes from spending some time with the script, and not like you’re learning lines but absorbing what the script has to offer.

I’d always had the concern that being in commercials would affect my credibility when I was getting started as a TV and film actor.

When I read the script and saw the jazz music setting, and when I read the name of the filmmaker was Damien Chazelle, I immediately got this mental image of Antoine Fuqua.

For me, the lean times were a wonderful, beautiful time of my life, struggling for many years in regional theater all over the country for not much money.

I’m just glad to be able to work.

People evolve and it’s important to not stop evolving just because you’ve reached ‘adulthood.’

I just saw ‘Men, Women & Children’ last night, and it’s a devastating movie in a lot of ways, but it’s so well done, so well acted.

I was in New York. I had been doing theater for many years, and then I got hired to a little part – they weren’t calling it an extra, but I didn’t have lines. It was a ‘featured’ part.

I never had intention of coming to New York or L.A. and actually doing more than scraping by – you know, doing plays. And as my career sort of progressed of its own volition, I did come to New York.

If I was doing a musical, I would never listen to the cast album, because I wanted to do my version of something.

I’ve had a contemptuous relationship with authority throughout my life. I found myself at odds with authority, and I’m disdainful of blind authority.

I read a very romantic book when I was young, when I was in college: Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet.’ And I’ve always felt that if you are in any kind of an artistic, creative endeavor, and you feel there’s something else you can do for a living and be happy, I think you should do something else.