Top 163 Quotes & Sayings by Jason Bateman - Page 2

When you're playing a supporting character, you don't really have a lot of control of the quality of the film.

I'm just going to try to stay employed. That's the tough part in this business.

Our kids will never have to remember things, because it's all in pictures. Want to remember your fourth birthday? There'll be video of it on your phone.

I can't assume that my kid is going to make the best decision all the time.

If you laugh, we just do another take. Laughter is too rare nowadays. If you can bust a gut, let it go, and we'll just go back to one.

The directing is something that is incredibly satisfying to me and challenging to me because it's asking me to draw on everything I've been able to absorb over all these years of acting and having all this set experience.

Meeting my wife Amanda was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. She wasn't going to let me screw around my life anymore, so I stopped drinking and started behaving like a decent human being.

I think it's always a good time to be in a political film in America because there's so much material for comedy.

I think NBC got a little reluctant to get behind single-camera shows after 'Scrubs' didn't do what they thought it was going to do following 'Friends.'

You do certain things in your twenties that are just not appropriate in your thirties and certainly not appropriate in your forties. Eventually you even the scales, and it's time to move on and become an adult and start working hard again and going to sleep a little bit earlier. Fortunately, I got a job to facilitate that transition.

I think the Internet is a huge positive.

It's very difficult to pretend you're throwing a car.

I'm not talented enough to drop everything and become somebody different.

There's this little recipe that you have to hit pretty well to get somebody to laugh. And it's a combination of the way in which you say something, with the facial expression that you have, married with the body language that you have, etc.

I try to see everything I do. It's a good learning tool for me. You kind of remember what you were going for when you were shooting it, and then see how it comes across in the context of what comes before and after it.

I wanted to be Dustin Hoffman or Robert De Niro or Al Pacino. I thought I was going to be a dramatic actor, but comedy sort of started out first, and I was like, 'Maybe I'll find some more drama later on in my career.'

You want 100% and 100% to make 200, instead of 50 and 50 making 100.

If you make a mistake, people are going to know about it really fast - and I was making a ton of them when I was a kid.

My father was a writer/director/producer, so instead of throwing a ball around, our bonding was going to see movies. And at an early age, I knew if I wanted to impress my dad, it was not going to be by throwing a ball real far.

It's not new: In the '70s, Archie Bunker said terrible things on 'All in the Family,' but it was all in Carroll O'Connor's performance. You saw lack of intelligence, and you laughed.

People say: 'Why do you want to play the straight man?' Well, it's because he gets to be in every scene.

I haven't met a lot of 'Hogan Family' fans.

I guess there's nothing funny about a guy who looks conservative and has it all together, but it's satisfying to see a conservative guy crumbling inside, and I think a lot of American comedy has cottoned on to that.

If it's a good part in a good movie, I'll do it.

As disciplined as I am, I'm also a huge hedonist.

Kids want you to take them to whatever kid movie is opening, and you just hope it's good because you're going to buy a ticket, no matter what. If it's no good, you kind of drape your arm over your kid so they don't get smashed, and you take a little nap.

It's not about the script: it's about who the director is and who the other people in the cast are. Because you can look at a great script and execute it in a very sophomoric way, and you can look at an OK script, and you can execute it in a very sophisticated way and come out with something really good.

I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated.

I'm not a big, huge star, and so when people see me, it's usually to talk about something I've done, and that's a great conversation to have. That's what we're doing it for.

Actors are sellers, and I figured out a long time ago that if you wanted to work a lot, you had to be on the buying side.

I like to give my daughter some rope and let her make her own decisions.

I didn't really watch 'Beavis & Butt-head' that much or 'King of the Hill,' but I was a huge 'Office Space' fan.

I was doing everything that a kid would be doing anyway, but on top of that, I was able to fly to different cities.

I'm not that great of an actor, so I can't, like, completely become somebody else.

There are worse things than being constantly hired to do anything.

You hit those valleys sometimes and it's really frustrating. It's like getting stuck in traffic on the freeway. But there's not much you can do about it.

My father was a director and producer, so when I was a little kid, he would take me to movies and show me what's good and what's not good and why, and often that would take me to a conversation about directing.

I don't really find a problem with technology or television or anything. I'm a product of it. I grew up watching TV, and I don't think I'm too dumb or too crazy.

I wasn't really interested in doing anything except going from pilot season to pilot season and sowing my oats in the months between and telling my agency to stop sending me movie scripts, because they'd pile up in my house and make me feel guilty because I had to read them.

I really empathise with some of my peers who had success in the early years; then it dries up, and so there's no reason to get up in the morning.

You can say your lines a million different ways and play your character a million different ways and still hit the common, agreed-upon finish line.

I don't want to be obnoxious with my ambition or sound like I expect any sort of entitlement here. Hollywood is not in the business of humoring people.

That's kind of the fun part about acting. We do get the right to kind of get from A to Z any way we want, as long as we start at A and end at Z.

I don't feel sorry for people in the public eye getting eyed by the public.

It earns you a lot of snark if you're able to convey vulnerability.

It's not a sprinter's approach. It's more like a long-distance thing. You can stick around a lot longer if you kind of slow-play it.

I think things that are really, really not good are easy to see. But films that are decent can either be made good or great based on the execution. At the end of the day, it's always a crapshoot about the execution, the level of taste, in any department.

It was a blast. I was doing everything that teenagers do and everything people in their twenties do. I was playing as hard as I was working, which was an effort to really balance my life.

I think you get the parts that people are comfortable with seeing you play.

Television is much more of a producer's writer's medium, so a lot of the time, when you're directing a television show, they have a color palette on set or a visual style and dynamic that's already been predetermined, and you just kind of have to follow the rules.

That straight man character is a short trip between comedy and drama in a project, so I can play the comedic beat on the same page as a dramatic beat. It gives me a lot of freedom as an actor to play scenes in multiple ways because I don't play the clown, nor do I play someone who is particularly maudlin.

I'm never happier than in the bed.

Ideally, that's what you've got in an acting career is an equal number of dramas and comedies and an equal number of small films and big films.

I try to figure out how much of the character I can find in myself because you don't want to get outside of your skill-set.

I'm a pretty normal guy. I'm really good at knowing how a normal guy would react in situations.

I feel incredibly fortunate I walked away, took care of other business, and then came back to show business.

I'd much rather have the freedom, and the obligation to use it responsibly, than be put in a box.

If the goal is to be believable when you're acting, I've got the best idea of what that believability might look and feel like. And because you need a normal guy in a comedy so that the eccentricities can pop, that's a good part for me.

There's a bunch of different flavours of funny. It's all about the execution of it.

We had this neighbor who was an actor, and he was going to an audition one day, driving by our house, and he asked if I wanted to tag along. He was reading for the part of the father, and they were reading for the part of the son the same day, and he told me to sneak in there and make it look like I knew what I was doing.