Top 70 Christopher Walken Quotes

I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.

I’ve always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre, and that’s really where my training is.

When you’re onstage and you know you’re bombing, that’s very, very scary. Because you know you gotta keep going – you’re bombing, but you can’t stop.

Also, I think there are huge reactions sometimes, which are also mysterious.

I live sort of in the country and I like that. It’s very quiet, it’s beautiful.

At its best, life is completely unpredictable.

One thing that’s happened to me is I’ve been around a long time and I’ve played a lot of villains and so forth. I think it had to do with, well one thing is that I looked younger than I was for a long time. Now I think I’m suddenly starting to play people’s father.

I think that sometimes when they see me in a movie they expect me to be something nasty. I mean, I play a lot of villains and you show up and they think maybe… That’s why it’s good to defy expectations sometimes.

To me, there are things you’re good at and things you’re not so good at. For some reason, I’m good at darker characters. It has to do with how you look.

I was born in America but all of my friends’ parents, everybody’s parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe. Many people in my neighborhood hardly bothered to learn English.

To be honest, I was never very ambitious. And I still am not.

You do something on television, and so many people see it that it follows you around. It’s interesting. I’ve done a couple of things on TV, and probably more people saw me than in all the movies I’ve made.

I was never a child actor. I was a child performer.

I think the fact that I grew up in show business had a real effect on my personality. If you were born in New York during the golden age of television, and you grew up on Broadway, that marks you.

The minute I start to talk about acting, I realize that I can’t. You know, it’s an abstract thing, a little bit mysterious even if you do it for a living.

When I was a kid, I worked in the circus. It was a touring circus that was owned by a man named Terrell Jacobs. It was just one big tent, and he was a lion tamer. He didn’t have any kids, but the bit was that I would dress up as his son in an identical outfit.

When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It’s hard to keep going when you don’t get any better.

I’ve been married for 46 years, and I live in a nice house, my grass is always cut, I pay my bills, and my cat loves me!

I don’t carry lucky charms, but I believe in those things.

I’ve been to Chicago a lot – it’s one of my favorite places. My wife is from Chicago, and I worked in the theater there a lot.

Well, I was sort of a jack-of-all-trades in show business for a long time. I was a singer and a dancer and then I got a job as an actor.

Emotional power is maybe the most valuable thing that an actor can have.

I like to stand in my kitchen with the script on a counter that’s about chest high. Usually I do something else at the same time – make a chicken or slice vegetables – and all day long I just read it over and over and over.

I don’t usually get to play fathers or grandfathers or uncles. Now that I’m older, maybe I can play people closer to myself. I’d like that.

I don’t much like being directed. I enjoy being allowed to play.

I like to go to work, and also, I don’t have any kids. I don’t have any hobbies. I don’t like to travel. So going to work is kind of it.

Quite often, I’ll be sent a script for a movie. And I find that I like it, so I say I’ll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it Walkenising.

I’m not much of an analyzer or a psychologist.

Some people can do things and get away with it. Comics are famously like that. Why is it that some guys can say the most horrible things and it’s not offensive, it’s funny?

I’ll tell you, Quentin Tarantino really writes the most amazing dialogue.

Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.

As an actor you become that lighting rod between the person who made the play and the audience.

You hear about things happening to people – they slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other way – and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something; you don’t want to die in some unnecessary way.

By the time I was 7, I did walk-ons, catalogue modeling, you name it. In the Queens where I grew up, you didn’t go bowling on Saturday; you went to dancing school.

I play disturbed people a lot, but always with a bit of distance or tongue-in-cheek. Most of the villains I play are essentially harmless.

I don’t like flying at the best of times. And as I get older, I like it less and less. I don’t much like driving, either. I prefer to be driven. And, when I’m in London, I don’t even like walking on the street. I can never get used to looking the right way when I cross the street.

I think I’m getting a little bit of Alzheimer’s. Just a little.

They have a kind of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby thing going on.

Because if I don’t know my lines, I really don’t know what I’m doing.

Onstage I have a natural chutzpa that audiences like. I’m out there.

I remember that. I was talking to him and I said how great it would be if actors had a tail because I have animals and a tail is so expressive. On a cat you can tell everything. You can tell if they’re annoyed. You can tell whether they’re scared.

I think if you do something effectively whether you’re the lover or the comic or the action guy or the villain like I play; movies are very expensive to make. Chances are you’ll get asked to play that part again.

It’s true in most movies I don’t use my own voice.

I’d love to do a character with a wife, a nice little house, a couple of kids, a dog, maybe a bit of singing, and no guns and no killing, but nobody offers me those kind of parts.

You know, there’s nothing you can do about your public image. It is what it is. I just try to do things honestly. I guess honesty is what you would call subjective: if you feel good about what you’re doing, yourself, if you figure you’re doing the right thing.

I grew up in the ’50s, in New York City, where television was born. There were 90 live shows every week, and they used a lot of kids. There were schools just for these kids. There was a whole world that doesn’t exist anymore.

Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew. It’s a rhythm thing – people who speak English where they have to hesitate and think of the right word. And I think it rubbed off.

I play a lot of, maybe a little bit, cartoonish people. I’ve been a Bond villain, and I play a lot of villains, people who want to take over something.

It’s interesting – a lot of good actors are good mimes. But I’m terrible. If I tried to do an impression, nobody would know what I was doing.

No, improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you’re doing.

My life is really quite conservative. I’ve been married nearly 50 years. I don’t have hobbies or children. I don’t much care to travel. I’ve never had a big social life. I really just stay home, except when I go to work.

I don’t play lovers. I wish I did. At least once I’d like to have a crack at one of those guys. A heartbreaker. Some people are born to it. I’m not.

Usually directors hire me because I’m what they are looking for. But once in a while, and it’s very rare, they will hire me and then try to make me over.

As an actor, I’m rather hit and miss; I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn’t.

I’ve made three musical movies which is pretty good considering that not many are made but I was lucky in other ways. I came along when independent movies were starting to boom.

I like cats a lot. I’ve always liked cats. They’re great company. When they eat, they always leave a little bit at the bottom of the bowl. A dog will polish the bowl, but a cat always leaves a little bit. It’s like an offering.

I think the fact that I was raised in show business, in New York City, in the ’50s, that’s affected my personality to the point that I’m a little different.

I’ve made movies that we’re very successful that we’re a complete surprise, and I’ve made movies that I thought we’re going to be very successful that, you know.

My father was a lesson. He had his own bakery, and it was closed one day a week, but he would go anyway. He did it because he really loved his bakery. It wasn’t a job.

In England, and all over Europe, and all over the world, actors act until they die. They get old, really old, and they’re still working. They just keep doing it.