Top 60 Mark Ruffalo Quotes

I was probably 8 years old; my mom let me stay up one night. She’s like, ‘You have to see this movie.’ It was ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ and it was on TV, and it was a big deal. And I saw Marlon Brando, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ That’s where it started.

I don’t have to be a leading man. I can be a character actor. That’s really what interests me anyway.

I come from a traditional theater background.

Actors, like it or not, their voices carry deeply into the culture: people look towards them for attitudes, for right or wrong, and today, the mainstream media doesn’t really balance the unheard.

I woke up one morning with the knowledge that I had a brain tumor. It wasn’t so much that I dreamt I had a brain tumor; it was like someone just poured the knowledge into my head. It wasn’t like an image; it was just like knowing. It was so weird, which is why I paid attention.

The sculptor Frosty Myers and I met when we were bidding against each other at an auction. He’s an eccentric, a liberal with a collection of rifles, and his stuff is big art. We share a love of tractors. I’m trading him one for a piece of art.

The fracking chemicals sit in open pits, get trucked around, or sent through pipelines that can burst. What do you think happens when frack chemicals and floods and storm swollen rivers mix?

I want to get into some television. There might be a perception about me being only a movie actor, you know, and there’s this whole new sort of frontier opening up in that medium.

They would never let me be a crossing guard when I was a little kid. It would come up, I’d always raise my hand, I would never get picked . They thought I was too wild, but I knew I was responsible enough, if I was given that task.

When I left my Catholic school, I was around 10 or 11 years old, and it started to unravel for me there. Kids pick up on things if you’re interested and inquisitive. I was seeing things that were not in line with what I’d been taught about Jesus. It didn’t jive with me.

But in my heart of hearts, this is the kind of thing… this is what everyone is struggling with in their lives – relationships and family. To me, it’s always an interesting area to mine. I’m drawn to it.

We’ll engage in pretty extreme violence in the world but, you know, the one thing that comes to humans as easily as eating or breathing or sleeping, is sex.

I like to think the movies that I’ve picked have something worthwhile to say. Something relevant.

I don’t want to feel like I’m stuck doing one-stock performances.

I love ‘The Sportswriter’ by Richard Ford. Ford really captures for me the bittersweetness of the quietly suffering American man. It’s stoic, sad, and really beautiful.

I’m a very hands-on father. I like being a hands-on father. I am probably more like one of my kids in my family, but the dominating kid.

Yeah, there’s a tendency to get pigeonholed in Hollywood.

I remember riding my bike down the boardwalk with nowhere to go and looking at the girls. It was really innocent.

I think where people get into trouble is hiding and feeling ashamed about what they don’t have any control over in the first place.

For some reason, my whole life has been, ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do that.’

It’s imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame.

People say funny things all the time during really serious moments in life.

Every piece of geopolitical strife that’s happening in the world today is revolved around energy, either trying to grab resources or people using resources to fund radical groups.

People use the Method as a shield; it shields them from being vulnerable. I hear all these young actors who are like, ‘I’m Method, I’m gonna go live in the house, you know, I totally get it, I’ve done it, I’ve been there’, but one thing I know is it kills spontaneity.

I have two hammocks, one Mayan and one Guatemalan, both family size because I like to lie in them perpendicular. When I’m working on a character, I lie in them and daydream. They’re the best tools for working that I have.

I’d never taken a job purely for money – I felt that would kill me – but I was afraid that I was heading that way. Then, my brother passing away was the final thing that kicked me over. It reminded me that life is short, and you’d better do what you want while you have a chance.

My mom was a hairstylist, but she quit doing that to raise the kids – there were four of us. There was no money.

Literally, I think I’ve quit acting three or four times, only for a few days. Maybe for a few weeks.

It’s been up, down, and sideways for me, man. I could become a huge star, or I could get cancer tomorrow.

I did a series of these soft-core horror movies called ‘Mirror Mirror.’ I got killed in ’em all – and each time, I came back as a different character. They were all straight-to-video.

I normally don’t have that much confidence. I usually am trying to talk to directors out of giving me a job.

My belief about acting in one foot on a banana peel and the other one in the grave.

I have mental illness in my family. I have a lot of compassion for those people.

I don’t know, one out of every two marriages ends up in divorce so there’s a lot of great people out there who people aren’t happy with.

We’re warriors, this culture, and we’re very puritanical about sex and very embracing about violence and I don’t know why that is.

I love acting with kids, cause they’re great acting partners. They’re totally present. Even when they’re acting, they’re still available and you can crack them up or something weird will happen and they’ll go with it.

Also, stick around. Don’t lose your heart, just keep going, keep at it.

Do theater. Because you’ll develop a craft that you’ll always have. It’ll give you a chance to really learn how to act and you won’t go into the world with a few measly tricks that will only carry you so far.

I don’t like to go to the gym very much if I can help it.

What is happiness other than a negotiation between reality and your dreams? It’s understanding that you give up something for something else. I feel like that’s been how I’ve been trying to be happy, although in my DNA there’s more of a depressed person.

I had to work on a Marlin boat, like gutting fish, like as the bait boy.

I still feel like I’m trying to make it. It’s hard to shed the struggling actor thing.

It’s a difficult undertaking. I’ve been married for four years and I see this movie as a cautionary tale about people who’ve gone deeply out of communication.

The laws of nature tell us there’s a finite amount of any substance on the face of the earth, and at some point, that’s going to run out. And if we’re smart and we have some grace and we have some willingness about our destiny, then we will take ourselves into the renewable world.

I’ve just been more interested in doing film right now and I don’t want to go away from my family for six months, which was what I would have had to have done if I did the play on Broadway.

Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.

You really can have your dreams and at the same time have a family. But it has to be a really deliberate practice.

I enjoyed growing up part of my life in Virginia Beach. We had the ocean and the beach and a beautiful landscape. We were outdoors all the time and we played outside.

I’d always been close to my brother. Very close.

When you’re a young actor, and you’re really fighting to have your place in the world – for me, anyway – it took a mental focus and energy and striving. It took a long time. And it was my whole life.

My personal belief is that you carry your own water in a relationship. If you see a girl and you think she’s hot, that’s a very human reaction, but you don’t go and tell your spouse that, you know? So in one way it’s how you behave.

I’ve never Googled myself on the Internet.

I’m like a Depression-era person as far as acting goes. It’s sort of like, grab it while you can and make the most of what’s in front of you. The first ‘Avengers’ opened up a host of things that I’ve been struggling to get made for a long period of time.

Whatever we want to think about American business – work hard, tell the truth, have morality – it’s a myth. There’s a lot of graft.

All of us have got to pay into a certain system, and what we’re saying is it’s 100% American that every American should be able to create, store and sell their own energy as they see fit. Let’s decentralize energy. Let’s democratize energy.

I think of marriage as a garden. You have to tend to it. Respect it, take care of it, feed it. Make sure everyone is getting the right amount of, um, sunlight.

I want to do a western. Nobody does westerns anymore.

But, the relationships that I see work – As long as they’re telling the truth, and saying the things that you don’t ever want to have to say to another human being.

If I’m working in the city, then as soon as I’m home, I try to lock in on my son for a few hours. Every day. I see how important it is that he’s starting to come into my world now. It’s just an effort to give him that male mode of being.

I like to disappear in the parts I play.