180 Quotes by Christopher Walken

I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell.

I have this theory about words. There's a thousand ways to say "Pass the salt". It could mean, you know, "Can I have some salt?" or it could mean, "I love you.". It could mean, "I'm very annoyed with you". Really, the list could go on and on. Words are little bombs, and they have a lot of energy inside them.

I'm better off not socializing. I make a better impression if I'm not around.

In the end, there's still the Word, everywhere... In Heaven and it's Angels, the Earth and Stars, even in the darkest part of the Human Soul It was there where it burned brightest. And for a moment, I was blinded.

Acting has to do with saying it as if you meant it, so for me the words are always very important. It's very important for me to know my lines, know them so well that I don't have to think about them.

At its best, life is completely unpredictable.

There's something dangerous about what's funny. Jarring and disconcerting. There is a connection between funny and scary.

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

I try not to worry about things I can't do anything about.

There are people who are able to plan their career, their future, but I've never had any talent for that. I just do things and hope for the best. Say yes, take a chance, and sometimes it's terrific and sometimes it's not.

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.

We have no way of knowing what lays ahead for us in the future. All we can do is use the information at hand to make the best decision possible.

And I think that when I play these villains, maybe what is different is that the audience sees me play these and they know that that's Chris and he's having fun and he knows that and he knows that and you know that and everybody knows that.

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.

I have a friend of mine who does me on his answering machine, and when I call him, I answer. It's pretty strange.

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.

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Well, I don't play heroes obviously. I never played the guy who gets the girl. It might be interesting to do a part where I was a father in a functional family.

Growing up in New York is like living in a horror museum because there are so many strange people walking the streets and riding the subways. You learn to develop a tough front if you live here, just in case you get into any kind of trouble and you need to talk your way out of it.

My hair was famous before I was.

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.

I've done a lot of things I cringe when I watch and some things I'm proud of... Movies are strange. You have to be a little bit lucky with them.

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.

I've always been a character actor, although I'm not quite sure what that means. All my scripts are absolutely covered in notes, so any time I say anything - even 'pass the salt' - I have six subtexts, comments on what I really mean when I'm saying that. Maybe that's what gives the impression that I'm saying one thing and thinking something else.

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

The last time I did a movie that needed a horse, I said: 'If it moves, I'm out of here.' The worst thing is, they know when you're afraid and act up accordingly. I've had them run off on me. Horses I do not like.

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.

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

A man can be an artist. In anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasey's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece.

Bear suits are funny - and bears as well.

In the theater you rehearse in order to do the performance. And in the movies the rehearsal and the performance are kind of the same thing. You're figuring it out and hopefully the camera is pointed at you when you're doing it.

I look for good possibilities in movies. I don't look for perfection.

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

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

I'm scared of everything. I think it's only sensible to be that way.

I'm a character actor. I have to find work in good movies where I can make something of my role. I'm a very lucky guy to be in that kind of position. It's like a kid who dreams of becoming a baseball player and then he gets to play for the Yankees.

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've never crashed a wedding. When I was a kid I, of course, used to crash parties. Crashing a wedding is difficult though because you have to have the suit, and you have to have information in case someone catches you. You have to know at least some names and something.

There's an impression that actors make a lot of choices. I just take what's there.

When I was a kid I joined the circus. I did that. It is true. But it's not like you think. There was a guy, he had his own circus. His name was Carol Jacobs and he owned it. It was a small thing.

I'm an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.

I tend to play mostly villains and twisted people. Unsavory guys. I think it's my face, the way I look.

It's very bizarre though when you get hired and then the director will say, "I know how this goes." And you're thinking, "Wait a minute, I thought that I was doing this" but basically what they really want, especially if they wrote it, is they want you to do it as they imagined it. It's virtually impossible.

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 used to love Danish. My father used to make a Boston cream pie. You never see that anymore.

Even in the limo, I buckle my seatbelt. I got that seatbelt on before the car moves.

It's not necessarily how many minutes you're on screen, it's the material you have. It's more important what it is you have to do than the amount of time you're there.

Acting is a bit like being an athlete. You spend all your time getting ready to do something for two minutes. All the things that made my career in the movies happen took two or three minutes, which is the time that it takes for a 'take'. In that time, something happens. That's what people know you for, just like someone running the hundred metres.

An actor really is a kind of intermediary between an audience and the piece, whether it's a play or movie.

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.

It's impossible for me to play a part without thinking about the audience.

I've made one or two movies that I haven't even seen, because they were never released. I have made things that I never even saw. But I will always go see the movie I'm in.

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.

Well, you know what they say. A bullet always tells the truth.

In rehearsal you have a good accident that you can repeat. In the movies if you have a good accident you hope the camera's running.

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

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

I think that weddings have probably been crashed since the beginning of time. Cavemen crashed them. You go to meet girls. It makes sense.

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.

When videotape came so a lot of movies that I do have a kind of afterlife in video. Things where movies that I do would come and go; they still come and go but you can go rent them and see them on TV.

Is typecasting really a problem?

I think all men when they get older, they look at the mirror and they probably see their father a little bit.

If you're an actor, a hard thing is to stick around, to stay viable. I try to do that by taking the opportunity to do something different every once in awhile.

A good actor is like a racehorse or a Ferrari. If a cylinder is missing on a Chevy, it's doesn't matter that much. But if something's not working right on a Ferrari, it makes a big difference. It's the three percent that makes the difference between good and great. It's a fine line. If you're not there, it's very painful.

Everybody has to be a little lucky, I think.

No, but way before that, I've been doing little dances in movies for years. Yeah, that was an amazing chance. You know, at my age to be able to do a music dance video, very unusual.

People come up to me all the time in New York. Not for autographs, but to talk about movies, often in a very scientific way.

Usually in the first performances I'm completely panicked. And I pull myself together. By the time you get to the end of the play, you really start to have fun.

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

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

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

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

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.

If I show somebody something that I've written and they say, "Eh...alright," I just put it away and I never show it to anyone again. But I know people who won't take no for an answer, and eventually someone pays attention.

In my personal life I'm very conservative. I've been married to the same person for nearly 50 years, I'm scrupulous about paying bills, avoiding debt. I'm very careful. But as an actor I'm pretty reckless. I've done a lot of things that, when I see myself on screen, I have to shut my eyes. And I've made a whole bunch of movies that nobody sees, including me.

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.

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.

Early on, I played one or two disturbed people, and I guess I must have been good at it, because it stuck. But, you know, I'm a regular guy. I stay home a lot, I make an effort to keep a distance from the whole social thing, the openings, the parties. I try to live in a calm way.

Yeah, well I've always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre and that's really where my training is. As an actor, that's my training.

There's not a lot of talking between actors - either between actors or between actors and directors. People think that they sit in rooms and talk about psychology and motivations. I don't think that happens much.

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.

I have a lot of trouble with scripts. I have a lot of trouble imagining things while I'm reading them.

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

Guns make me very nervous. They're dangerous. I'm more of a pacifist than anyone could imagine.

My father passed away a couple of years ago, but he was very old. He was almost a 100 years old. And, you know, he had a very good life. He came to America and he had a good life.

Death is wonderful because you can't think about it. How are you gonna think about it?

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

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 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.

When I'm on the road making a movie in another city, on my day off, I always go to the movies. I love going to the movies. You get a ticket and sit there, and it's very interesting to be around people who aren't personally invested in you, in any way. They're just going to the movies.

An audience is the most dangerous thing in the world, because they paid, and they're looking at you. And they paid! And there's a lot of them! And they cast a cold eye, because they paid. To be on the stage, you have to be very secure.

I don't think I'd be a good director because people would ask me, you know, "What is it? What's going on here? Where should I put the camera?" Or, "What's my motivation?" And I would say, "Do whatever you want!"

Sometimes a certain innocence is good, but not about yourself.

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 don't have kids. Maybe that's kept me young. I have a wife for almost 50 years and she looks after me a little bit like I was seven years-old.

The thing about cooking is it's so interesting to watch. I don't know why, but if you go to somebody's house and they're making something, they usually say interesting things while they're cooking.

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.

One of the difficult things about being an actor is to stick around.

Obvious things like The Deer Hunter. After that happened, the scripts got better. Opportunities happened.

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.

People think that my favorite roles to do are villains, but I find comedy to be the most challenging and rewarding.

The best thing for me is, when I'm not working, is to be at home and to have a script or two scripts is better, and to be just walking around the house and just thinking about the lines.

Laurence Olivier said in an interview once that when he plays a tragedy he always aims for the funny parts, and the other way around. Because in a comedy you look for what's serious. I think that's true. Sometimes things are really funny if you're absolutely earnest. If you're really serious, it's hilarious.

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.

I don't need to be made to look evil. I can do that on my own.

I feel like you are this or that because other people say so. I wouldn't know how to play a psychopath. I don't think about it that way. You think about playing the scene but if the other people say that guy is crazy, then you are.

I've been very fortunate, because I've been involved in things that very often lead to obscurity. I was in some pictures that were not successful whatsoever. I think people admire persistence. People notice that I'm still there.

I do like to work. Some jobs are better than others. That's the thing: You really don't know. I've enjoyed making movies for lots of different reasons. Sometimes, it was the other people. Sometimes, it was the fact that I was really good in it. Sometimes, it was the location. Sometimes, it was the paycheck.

I don't even like holding them. Whenever I hold a gun, I want to get it out of my hand as quick as possible.

A job leads to a job, just like anything else, and it became apparent that this was probably what I was going to keep doing.

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.

I come from a show-business family, so wanting to become an actor never crossed my mind. It was just a part of my life.

I've made a couple of movies in the jungle, and I don't want to go back to the jungle.

If you play a king, it's better if everybody treats you like a king.

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

I know that whenever I think about death, I come up against a stone wall.

I want to make movies on a soundstage. They close the door and it's nighttime, daytime. If it has to rain, they make the rain. That's what I like.

All actors do what they do differently, and it doesn't matter.

It takes a very long time to read a script. I'll look at a script, but there are so many scripts. I remember once being at the dentist, and the guy was doing my teeth and telling me about the screenplay he'd written and he said, "Will you read it?" And I said "Oh...okay." And it turns out that it was about a dentist!

There are places I don't want to go. Making movies on tops of mountains, in the desert, playing scenes while icy torrents of rivers rush by. The jungle. It's very uncomfortable.

I don't have a lot of hobbies. I don't play golf. I don't have any children. Things that occupy people's time. I just try to take jobs.

I have boxes full of stuff. Most actors do have a trunk full of stuff, paintings or scripts. It never comes to anything.

I suppose in order to succeed at something you have to be very persistent. I've never done that.

You never forget how to dance. It's just a matter of your bones working and things like that.

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.

I have made a number of movies that I have never seen. It's not a matter of ego. It's a matter of being disappointed. It's really a shame. It's just as difficult to make a movie that no one cares about as to make a hit.

I always like to watch comics and it's interesting that you can tell if someone's funny in 10 seconds.

I have been in movies that I thought I wasn't very good in.

I've made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you're in a movie and you think, 'I wish more people saw that' - because you're good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that's show business.

My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I look for things in different places, sometimes things happen.

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.

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.

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.

My favorite characters are the ones that are the most successful movies.

Movies are terrifically optimistic enterprises.

I wasn't a trained actor, I was trained in musical comedy theater, and when you do that, the audience is completely part of the thing. It's like Elizabethan theater. You play the scene, and then you turn - the audience is part of it.

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.

There are movies that I've made where I thought I was going to be good, but when it was cut it together it wasn't. And there are a lot of movies that, for one reason or another, just don't become popular. So to me it's always been a little bit of a roll of the dice. That's the way it goes.

I make movies that nobody will see. I've made movies that even I have never seen.

I think that if I had grown up and had been in show business and the movies twenty five, thirty years earlier, I think I would have made a lot more musical movies.

If you do movies that are modestly budgeted, the way they finance them is they figure out how they can sell them.

There probably aren't a lot of actors my age who tap dance.

It's what actors call a big, juicy part, when you're a leading man. I don't get a lot of those. I get a lot of supporting 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.

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

Older actors, and women in particular, are getting more opportunities. It pleases me, its very good news for us. They say that people are living longer, and maybe it's just that there's more of us out there.

I have always refused to do something that has offended me. I have been offered potential roles that are totally vulgar.

Too many young actors are strutting about and doing films without having developed some of the depth you need to bring off certain kinds of roles. I think that's the problem with the system, where a lot of younger actors who haven't had a chance to develop suddenly become stars.

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've never made a movie I wasn't surprised to see.

I grew up in music theater playing to the audience - singing and dancing and showing off. That's really my background. But the camera's different. I think I'm more at home on stage.

Of course they may have corrected it by now, but the original titles at the end of Annie Hall say "Christophe Vlaken." It was just inconceivable. These things are checked...I don't know what that was about. I'd never seen or heard of it. How they came up with the name Christophe Vlaken, it must've been a conspiracy. I did ask about it but nobody knew.

I got to playing villains-I don't know how. I think it's like anything else, in the movies in particular that if you establish yourself as something and you're lucky enough to keep getting hired. You know, there are guys who play the guy who gets the girl, guys who are the best friend of that guy, there's the funny guy, the villain.

It's very hard to get a movie made. You could spend your life reading scripts that never got made.

In the theater you rehearse for a minimum of five to six weeks. And then you get to play it. Which means you get to get better. That's the great thing about the theater.

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. But this is a nice part.

I became an actor by accident. I suppose I figured since I was in musical comedy from the time I was a teenager, I suppose I figured that I'd always been in that world to some extent.

I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy - or, I don't tend to get those parts. I've tended to play eccentrics. I've played a lot of villains, of course.

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 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.

I get a lot of invitations, and sometimes it's far away, it's in Montana or something. "We'd like you to come to our daughter's wedding." These are people I've never heard of. I get a lot that. "Will you come to my son's graduation?" No...I guess when you're in stuff, it's almost a feeling that they know you.

I became an actor kind of by accident. I was in musical theater and I got a job as an actor in a play and kept going. But I never set out to be an actor; it happened over time.

Morning is the best time to see movies.

My background is in musical comedy.

I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.

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

I became an actor by accident.

My background is in musical comedy. I didn't know I was going to be an actor. But all my points of reference have to do with musical comedy and in being kind of a showoff.

For me, in movies, it's always a mixed bag. I've never made a movie where I thought, "You were really good in that movie; you were good all the time." No. It's always, "You didn't get it, you didn't do it in that scene, but the other scene is pretty good." So I just hope that in balance there's more good scenes than not.

I'm in a place in my life where I get offered parts that I didn't get offered before - fathers and uncles and grandfathers and so on. And it took me a long time to get to that place, but I'm glad because it opens up new territory.

Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. I never know how successful a movie is going to be - when you make a movie you're always hoping for the best.

I've made quite a number of movies that I've never even seen and I've made some movies that I thought were good that nobody saw... Sometimes they end up on television.

I'm not sure I'd write a good cookbook, but I might make a good cooking show.

There are certain directors where you know you're going to be good or you're not going to be there. There are people where you kind of know that if you miss the mark then it'll probably not be in the movie and that's very reassuring.

I come from a part of New York that was almost entirely immigrants. I was born in America, but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe.

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 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.