Top 66 Casey Affleck Quotes

My family would be supportive if I said I wanted to be a Martian, wear only banana skins, make love to ashtrays, and eat tree bark.

There was no one moment when I decided I would spend my life acting. I am not certain that I will. Acting has never been a consistent passion. I have done it since I was young – so I have been acting for 30 years – but intermittently. I always had other jobs, joys, and creative outlets.

I like studio movies; I love big commercial movies.

What is acceptable in our culture, I think, is really detrimental. I think we ought to have a little more ownership over the kind of material and the content that we put in front of people, especially young people.

One thing I don’t do anymore is read or pay attention to the critical response, which is a bummer because when I started, and when I was in school, I loved to read old film criticism.

In New York, as long as you’re not peeing in someone’s doorway, everyone thinks you’re a gentleman. I feel like my behavior goes over better on the streets of New York.

It’s part of the actor’s job to show up with a head full of steam, to have their own take on this. So that way, you’re not relying on, ‘OK, tell me how to do it.’

My mom has a good way of engaging me in a conversation about the choices I make, listening, being objective and open-minded, and respecting those choices so long as they don’t put me in danger.

I have been lucky enough to work with people who inspire me, who I admire and respect, and who have made films – before working with me – that I continually return to over the years because they are so good.

Is it really every 10 years that you get to work on a great movie? That can’t be.

The first thing that I remember auditioning for was a weather commercial in Boston, and I got the job. The idea of the commercial was that you ought to watch the weather in the morning so that you know what’s gonna come later in the day.

I didn’t have to audition. That’s common, but it had never happened to me before. Normally, I hate auditioning. I need to stew and think… let the character develop and grow inside me.

What I learned on ‘To Die For,’ I learned over the years that followed, when some memory from the shoot would bubble up to the surface of my mind, and I could see it from a new perspective. I would usually cringe when that happened.

I feel like there’s an obligation – this sounds terribly pretentious – if you’re an artist, to share your own experience in a way that’s truthful and honest: ‘This is what I have to share; this is my life.’

I was 14 years old when my dad went into rehab, and he stayed there for a long time – I don’t know, 10 or 12 years maybe. He first was there as a resident, as someone trying to get sober, and it took a long time; and then he stayed on helping people get their GED.

If you have kids, you feel everything stronger. It’s like someone turning the lights on in your inner room.

I am in the process of starting a nonprofit organization that gives rescued animals a home in a simulated wild environment and, for those who have been tested on, who are disabled, aggressive, etc., their own space to live out their days.

I’ve chosen the parts that have interested me and parts that I thought I could do a job with but also were challenging and a little bit scary.

A lot of the times, I end up having to do jobs to sort of pay the bills.

I was really short in high school. I was stuck on the bench in the baseball team, so I just thought I’d try out theater, and that was the last time I did sports.

I’m tired of playing the brat.

When a performance isn’t working, it’s usually because the actor is trying to do something and they’re not able to express their idea very well. It’s a muddled expression.

I believe veganism can be beneficial for the individual and the world, and of course the animal, but belief is like laying in the dark with someone and telling them you love them and hearing nothing back. So I’ve never had the confidence to get on a soapbox and tell someone else what to do.

I do think people do pick movies that reveal something about them that they aren’t always aware of. If you ask them what kind of an actor they think they are, they’ll probably tell you something different than what they’ve actually done.

I’m tired of answering questions about myself.

When I was a kid, we didn’t really leave Cambridge, which was the town where I grew up in.

You sleep with people all the time that you hate.

After I left LA… it was like waking up. And so I moved back east and stopped auditioning.

I wish I had more control over my career, but making movies is something you do with lots of people.

In a movie we try to deceive. In theaters, as they say, the deceived are the wisest.

I’ve run into people who say, ‘I know what you’re like: You’re a Boston guy.’ That’s so weird. This person who doesn’t know anything about me thinks they know a lot because of the city I grew up in, which, to me, is a meaningless label. There are all kinds of people from Boston.

I love getting ready to do a scene, and thinking about it, and talking about it. But the rest of the time, I’m so nervous and obsessed. I’m just tearing my hair out in the trailer. The whole time I’m really tense.

If you’re a director and someone shows up and asks how I do it, I’d imagine, as a director, you’re like, ‘Man, I’ve got a million decisions to make; can you show up with an idea for the scene?’

When other people say, ‘Oh you’re so-and-so’s friend, brother, or husband,’ it’s reductive to the point of being white noise.

It seems like they never say anything bad about actors, they just pump them up.

Movies are collaborative, and that’s part of what makes it a great experience. They’re different from a lot of other art forms, but also it makes it seem like when you see the final product, you go, ‘I wouldn’t have done that. I wouldn’t have done this.’

I’ve seen ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ about 25 times each, so I like all kinds of movies, but I’m drawn, as an actor, to dramas about humans living lives I can relate to.

I get very sentimental, I get very nostalgic, and when I live in a place, I instantly put down way too many roots.

The first movie was mostly about George and Julia. This one is mostly about me and Catherine and our love story and our whole history. So it’s a very different movie.

My first exposure to TV, film, theater, the idea of what acting was, is I was a little kid, and my mom’s best friend was a local casting director in Cambridge, Mass. Her name was Patty Collinge.

I moved out to LA, got an agent, started auditioning. I didn’t know anything about how it worked. And since I was really bad, luckily, I didn’t get any of those parts.

Some people go to their job. That’s the job they have; they have to do it. They hate their boss and their coworkers, this and that. It’s hard to get along.

There isn’t any sibling rivalry; I think we have very different, very individual career paths and have never really thought that way. He’s my brother. I only have one, and we’re very close. We wouldn’t ever allow that stuff affect our relationship.

All cultures are different. Some commit genocide. Some are uniquely peaceful. Some frequent bathhouses in groups. Some don’t show each other the soles of their shoes or like pictures taken of them. Some have enormous hunting festivals or annual stretches when nobody speaks. Some don’t use electricity.

When I like someone a lot, I get scared that I’ll let them down. My fear of sucking is worst when I feel like someone thinks I’m good.

They wanted me to do Scream 2, and I hate talking about movies I turned down, because it sounds judgmental. There’s nothing wrong with horror movies. I enjoy watching them. The main reason I turn a part down is if I think I won’t be good.

Lots of movies don’t kind of work as well as they do on the page.

Celebrity never really served me that well; it serves other people well.

People should try eating no animal products for just one day a week.

Truth is, there’s never really been anything so horrible said about me that I haven’t either thought of or said to myself.

I knew it would be hard work, but that’s the reason you’re an actor. If you’re a bricklayer, you don’t want to just show up at someone’s house and put a little row of bricks around their garden. You want to build a building.

I have a very bad relationship with mice.

Sometimes I pick parts because I think, ‘OK, it scares me,’ and that’s an indication it’s going to be a good movie for me to do. Sometimes that leaves me in a terrible… Well, it doesn’t always pan out, you know?

The four movies I can remember seeing as a kid were ‘The Elephant Man,’ ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ and ‘Mad Max!’ Two of those are westerns. So the western genre is emblazoned on my memory from childhood, and those are two great movies.

I think there’s a certain amount of pressure depending on how demanding the part is, depending on how great the material is. I feel a certain amount of pressure to rise to the occasion.

In my movies, there has been little to do in the way of animal rights. I have never worked in a movie with animals. No horse-riding, no trained dogs, lions, bears. A few actors, but what could I do? We had to have them.