Top 90 Quotes & Sayings by J. K. Simmons - Page 2

Maybe when my kids are grown up, I can go back to Broadway. It would be great someday, I suppose.

The best complement I ever got from the public or producers or directors is that I just totally blend in and become the character and they don't notice me and that the play happens or the movie happens or the TV show happens.

I've always believed, maybe naively, that 'The play's the thing.'

I went from being a jock to a hippie. It was a very clear-cut decision. I had to be one or the other. I had to forsake that other aspect of myself. Or thought that I had to, which is regrettable. Quickly, I was back in the pine trees with the hippies, listening to my Jimi Hendrix and my Janis Joplin and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.

I want to be like Bradley Cooper when I grow up.

Education is very important to me.

I would like to thank the 49 actors who appear on screen in 'Whiplash' for realizing Damien Chazelle's vision so beautifully.

It's nice to be number one on the call sheet.

I'd always had the concern that being in commercials would affect my credibility when I was getting started as a TV and film actor.

I don't think I've ever watched a movie to prepare for a role.

I read 'Whiplash,' and I wanted to do it.

I don't often do a lot of that kind of research, but when it's something specific like 'Oz' - which I fortunately did not have a lot of experience with - I will. I read 'The Hot House,' about being on the inside at Leavenworth prison.

I like to stay home. I don't want to be away shooting in Europe for six or eight months at a stretch.

Good material is good material.

My overall quest is always to do something that's somehow different from whatever it is that I just got done doing. If that can include occasionally playing an older guy who has a romantic side and a romantic relationship, than that's a real treat.

In lean times, you get plenty of sleep, and you're not flying around everywhere.

I'm just glad to be able to work.

For me, the lean times were a wonderful, beautiful time of my life, struggling for many years in regional theater all over the country for not much money.

I play tons of authority figures, whether it's the dad or the cop or the boss. I think it's a combination of how I look, who I am.

If I see a now-28-year-old woman coming up to me, she's probably thinking of 'Juno' because she watched it with her parents when she was 18 years old.

I wasn't a comic book aficionado at all when I was a kid, but my cousin Weed was. Every time we went to visit him on the farm, he had two really fun things: comedy albums and comic books.

My aunt was so attuned to commercials that she could always identify the voiceover actor.

A lot of the stuff about white-supremacist groups was very family-friendly: 'We just love our people.' One the surface, you go, 'Gee, what's wrong with loving your people?' But when you love your people to the exclusion of everything else that's remotely different, that's when you get into trouble.

I read a very romantic book when I was young, when I was in college: Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet.' And I've always felt that if you are in any kind of an artistic, creative endeavor, and you feel there's something else you can do for a living and be happy, I think you should do something else.

For me, if the words are good on the page, the rest of it comes from spending some time with the script, and not like you're learning lines but absorbing what the script has to offer.

My understanding, from what I've learned so far about Commissioner Gordon, is that he's the older guy with the mustache who relates with our hero in a certain way.

I come from a family of educators. My sister is a college teacher. My dad is a college teacher, but first a junior high teacher.

The first thing I did that was at all in the public eye, other than on stage, was 'Oz,' in which I played the head of the Aryan Brotherhood in a maximum-security prison.

I started out as a singer and a musician, and I was taught that your job is just to get out of the way of Brahms or Arthur Miller or Shakespeare and convey the brilliance that they created.

By the time I started doing TV and film, I was in my forties, so I wasn't going to do the young up-and-comer.