Top 57 Quotes & Sayings by David Morse
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American actor David Morse.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
As actors, we often look for the scene, big moments that say, 'This is why you have to do this role.'
I've always tried to not let movie, television or theatre be all that my life is about. I've always tried to get involved in the community or my family now I have kids.
There's been one movie star that would not work with me because of my height. I had so many people who had to stand on boxes when they do scenes with me.
I don't even know what TV star means. I know there's a difference in how people approach you, compared to movies. They feel OK coming up to you and sitting with you in a restaurant, unfortunately.
Everything is interesting to me.
No matter how many people tell you, Save your money, when you've got a series, you never do. Somehow it doesn't seem important. Maybe it's because you've been without money for so long as an actor.
I want to talk about my very first play, when I was in eighth grade. One day, my English teacher, Mrs. Baker, announced that we were going to read 'On Borrowed Time' out loud in class. I was a mediocre student; I was terrified that she was going to call on me, so I hid my head.
In independent film you tend to have stories that involve more of a community, and the smaller characters are important to the story.
My first summer at a repertory theater, I was making $20 a week. I was making a living, as far as I was concerned, and I was doing theater. And next season, I made $40 a week. But I don't think anyone in my family would have considered that making a living.
With Sean Penn, he wants to be surprised. He doesn't necessarily want what he's written, although we'll do what he's written. He likes the danger of acting.
Just in terms of when I got the script, the character I probably liked the least was Big Foster. Because even though he was central to the story and to that world, he was really written to be kind of a brute, a pig, a completely black-and-white bad guy.
By the time I could have played football, I was already into acting and that's what I wanted to do.
I have a DVD player and I have DVDs, and I have no time to watch any of them.
I had almost no money, but with the little bit I had, I got a ticket to see 'That Championship Season' at the Booth theater.
I had the great good fortune of working with Christopher Plummer, Frances Sternhagen, and Arthur Hill early in my career, and it set a standard for the kind of work I want to do.
I was involved with some great things in television that I could never have done in film.
I've tried to let the work I do speak.
I will be always grateful to NBC.
Film is a very intimate medium.
I don't care about the money. I just need, as an actor, to do as many different things that I can to make me feel good about myself.
I've done scenes in films that I felt like the performance was better in certain takes, but they couldn't use them because it didn't match what the person was doing when they came around and the camera was on them.
In my first film, I was a basketball player. Like every good actor, I lied when they asked me if I could play.
'Outsiders,' I guess, is sort of dark, but I don't really think of it as dark. The world up there on that mountain, it had the potential to have a lot of fun as well as a lot of drama, these guys raiding the town in their ATVs with their tattoos. It seemed like something different.
I've had the chance to work with Christopher Plummer, one of the great stage and film actors, a couple of times, including on 'Prototype,' the first TV movie I ever did. It was science fiction in the Ray Bradbury sense, written by the famous team who created Columbo, Levinson, and Link.
Because I'd only done theater, that's really what I thought most of my life would be. I always figured that movies would be a part of it at some point. I didn't know how or when.
At 17, I became a member of the Boston Repertory Theatre. I had an opportunity pretty quickly and performed with the theater for six years.
Big Foster is a guy who was in line to be the head of this clan that's been up in the mountains for 200 years, because his father was the leader or the Bren'in, his mother is now Bren'in, and they're kind of royalty, so he was in line to be next. He'd been promised it from a young age, but it just hasn't happened.
Part of the problem when I was doing 'How I Learned to Drive' is I would see my kids one night a week for six months, and that was just too hard. We moved to Philadelphia after we lost our house in the earthquake, the '94 Northridge earthquake.
I was stuck as a Boomer type in a lot of people's minds.
You get to the middle of a take that's going really well and the camera will run out of film. They have to stop you, apologize and then you've got to get things going all over again.
It's great to be able to have your feet in both worlds. I wouldn't want to be just stuck in one or the other.
In high school, I tried out for every sport there was. But none of them would have me. When I was a freshman, someone asked me to go audition for a play with them. I got in and didn't want to do anything else for the next four years.
Home wasn't a pleasant place to live, growing up.
The relationship with producers has always, in my experience, been, uhhh - tense. Challenging. But the actors and crew become like family. You're there all those hours - more than on a movie. You come to depend on each other.
I'm acting for the pleasure of it.
I gave up planning when our children were born, when I had three children to feed and a roof to keep over our head and all of that. Early in my career, I said I would never do television at all; then I wound up doing nothing but television for 10 years when I did 'St. Elsewhere' and all those TV movies.
With repertory, you had to play all these different characters. The range of roles is really what I fell in love with, every night getting to become somebody different. That was my idea of acting, getting to be part of the company and a family.
I'm not sure I always feel like I'm in the seat. Sometimes I'm only holding on by one hand and flying out behind the roller coaster. I don't know anybody who doesn't feel that way.
I was a teenager and it was tough years for me. Being able to bring myself into a character and live in somebody else's world was so important for me emotionally. I couldn't express things well in my normal life. I was so overwhelmed by my emotions.
I don't like talking about myself. I'm not really interested in myself. One of the good things about being a supporting actor is that you get to talk about other people.
To this day, that's what I love the most: finding and playing characters who are out of my experience.
I was getting to the point where I said to my wife, 'I don't think I'll ever be in New York in a play again.'
I try to do things I haven't been able to before.
One year, I went to Cannes with the film 'The Indian Runner' that Sean Penn directed. Everyone else in the film was all the same height, and on the red carpet, when they were taking photos, none of them would stand next to me, and I totally got it.
I just figured, "If I can do theater, agents will find their way."
I thought, "I don't want to be the only unfunny guy in this movie. I really would like to be somehow involved in the comedy if I'm going to do it."
I didn't want to do television at all. I really didn't want to do it. I really thought I was just going to be doing theater and doing movies.
I have so many people who still talk to me about The Long Kiss Goodnight, about that being one of their favorite movies, and it really was a fun movie.
I'd never done any film or television. Well, I'd done one little stupid commercial in Boston when I was doing theater, but that was it.
I think that's really risky to make yourself unsexy, because the business demands that women be sexy.
The real future of the Hispanic targeted media and advertising is in English.
For a lot of people, if they're lucky, it begins with somebody who recognizes something in them.
When you walk on the set, whatever it is, you commit yourself to the job. You're committing yourself to doing the best you can do with it, no matter what you feel about it, and that never changes.
A lot of the things I've enjoyed the most and that I think have been the best are ensembles.
What I didn't realize is that the writing process for comedies is that you do your table read, and if you aren't funny on that first day during the table read, they take your jokes away and give them to somebody else.
When I was in school, in eighth grade, someone recognized something in me. She was an English teacher, and we read a play out loud in class, and she asked me to read one of the roles. I'd never done anything like that before, but something just lit up.
I wouldn't mind having another shot at doing comedy, but I'm not sure that's the way I'd want to go.
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