Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Javier Bardem - Page 2

I don't like to talk about my personal life.

I've always belonged to the street, and I always will. It's in my DNA.

When you are portraying somebody that has a very specific emotional weight, you feel like you're really starting to abandon your own body and go to someplace else.

I'm a great believer in stunt doubles. They do an amazing job.

Many people out there don't have a choice in choosing their friends and the people they're being manipulated by. Thank God, I have that choice. I can use my judgment and choose.

The good thing about being an actor, and the gift of being an actor, is that you are beautifully forced to see the world with different eyes.

When I was born, there was a very isolated idea of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and you belonged to one gender or the other.

The middle and working classes are paying the debt that the financial markets created.

The background - your own history - is way more important than what you can achieve as a professional.

A part of being an actor is I people watch. I like to observe their behaviour, watch their reactions on the street and see how they talk to each other, and that's impossible when they are looking back at you. I used to enjoy taking the train and watching people in their own minds, struggling with themselves.

You don't need a man, you need a champion.

[That night] I was sitting by Jack Nicholson with my long list of thanks, and I said, `I'm so nervous. I don't know what to say if I go up there.' He said, `Don't get emotional, drop the names, and dedicate it to your mother.'

I don't think an actor needs to necessarily go through his things to do his job. I think it's way more important to imagine. And then, when you're imagining, your experiences, your images and your own personal things will show up, but you keep imagining. You don't get stuck in your own personal things, otherwise you are telling your story in every character, and that's not interesting for anybody.

I think the most difficult love begins with one's self. How you treat yourself is something you bring to your relationships.

As an actor, you can't judge. A great actress from Spain said, "We, the actors, are lawyers of the characters we play. We have to defend them, no matter what."

I'm not the kind of actor that gets crazy with [directors'] names, what draws me toward a project is the material itself.

Many people out there don't have a choice, in choosing their friends and the people they're being manipulated by.

I wanted to become a painter for a while. I think it was because I was lazy.

The earliest memories I have from my childhood are of my mum getting ready to go on stage. I must have been about five and I would watch her vomiting backstage on opening night, and then the next minute she became Isabella, the Queen of Spain. At the time I remember thinking, 'What kind of schizophrenic job is this?' Now it all makes sense.

I'm getting so old - it's more uncomfortable to do those scenes now than when I was 20. I mean, I don't have a big problem with nudity on screen. But usually the days when you do those naked love scenes are the weirdest ones on set. Everyone is uncomfortable. You're like, 'Hi. How are you?' Then the next minute you're with an actress who you don't know and you're pretending to make love to her in front of all the crew. The acting challenge is pretending things are OK.

I look in the mirror and I don't see a sex symbol. I just see a guy who looks like he's been beaten with a baseball bat. I mean, is this the face of a sex symbol? They say that because I work in the movies.

In 22 years of acting, I've only done two movies where I, personally, kill people. The Coens called me the Spanish Ballerina on (the No Country For Old Men) set, because every time I had the gun, when they called cut, I'd give it back and say, 'Take this s**t out of my hands!' There were laughing, like they couldn't believe I was supposed to be the villain.

My first part was in a film where I played a sadomasochist who killed people and created fun orgies. I'm a method actor. I went to every orgy in the world.

Only unfulfilled love can be romantic

All of the good movies are based on how that story was told. And you cannot do it with a bad script, that's for sure, no matter who.

When you're working with the best, it helps you to be good because then you are focusing on what you have to do.

I hate violence. When I hold a gun, I feel death in my hands, but it's fun to pretend in the movies.

I'm a huge fan of the director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and his work, and I knew he was going to be an amazing actor's director, based on the performances that I saw in his movies.

You shall love. Whether you like it or not.

I've played people that are on the line of evil and good, but that's life. We are always playing with the good and the bad. I see them as people. I don't see them as caricatures. I try to not make them caricatures. Maybe I fail, but I try to see what' behind them. Would I play the hero? A superhero? I don't think so. But, I play good guys. There are some there, but you have to look.

I don't know how to drive a car. The only thing I can do is act, but it's not something I even feel comfortable doing.

Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time.

This great imperialistic world called the United States has made us believe that an Oscar is the most important thing in the world for an actor. But if you think about it for five minutes you realise it cant be.