Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Bettany

The fact that in America bread lasts so long. You buy bread, and then it's bread forever - it's Forever Bread!

I don't enjoy watching action films, but I loved films like 'Rust and Bone' and 'The Beat That My Heart Skipped.'

The trouble with talking about acting is that it's like sex. It's enormously fun to do but just dreadfully embarrassing when you have to talk about it.

Yeah, I love history and I loved it as a kid.

I'm never late, and I love that. Because when you've got three kids and a life to be living, and somebody's half an hour late to set, you start to get a little bit like, 'Come on. Come on, let's get this done.'

I think when you're trying to produce a relationship on screen that doesn't actually exist, perhaps sometimes there's a temptation to look at each other more, to touch each other more.

So the actual privilege is that you can then take time off - and if you don't, you're a fool. You're earning all this money to support children whom you then don't see, which is absurd.

I know great actors whom nothing has ever happened for.

It's weird, because usually if you're British and you go to America you play baddies; but I play naughty people here and goodies in America.

For a while, I stopped enjoying making movies and I stopped enjoying acting, because I made a few decisions that I wish I hadn't made.

I've noticed, in the ebbs and flows of success and popularity, so much of it is fraudulent and to be distrusted.

I was born a Catholic and now I'm a lapsed Catholic. I'm something but I'm not a believer any more.

Paul is an awful name. I might as well be Bob.

Film used to have to be niche and find its audience in a little art house cinema, and TV had to work for everybody. And now it's kind of flipped where there's so many platforms that TV can be incredibly niche.

There are lots of people that make movies. It's not just the director.

I loved working with Peter Weir. I think he's one of the greats and will be remembered as one of the greats.

I find parties difficult. I like a dinner party, but I find being at parties difficult, so I choose not to go to parties.

My relationship with 'Star Wars' is that I'm old enough that I saw it when it first came out - 'A New Hope,' that is - and it was like when Dorothy steps out of black and white into Technicolor. I was transported from a gray, miserable 1970s London into a different galaxy, and I didn't know what it was, but I wanted to be a part of it.

I'm an immigrant - I've got to be in the city: London, Vienna, or Rome, but always a city.

You can fudge a lot as an actor, but you can't fudge being a parent.

I did eight months of training for 'Wimbledon,' and then, by the time I finished the movie another four months later, I was like, 'That's me. I'm done with tennis.'

Up until like five seconds ago, I just took what jobs came along.

The difficulty of looking at a system like natural selection if you have any sort of moral sense yourself, is almost what makes it beautiful.

I think the success of the Marvel films comes from the fact that they're made by fans. They really love those characters. When I first came out dressed as Vision, Kevin Feige nearly cried.

We all have different thresholds for sentimentality. For me, it's a hard won happy ending.

But I feel truly wowed by the architecture and the meaning of the architecture if you get lost in it and think about the man hours in the smallest little chapel, and the love involved. God it's fantastic.

I'm sure some people have an absolute grasp of where they are in their careers. I just don't think about it that much.

In America, they shoot budgets and schedules, and they don't shoot films any more. There's more opportunity in Europe to make films that at least have a purity of intent.

I got a phone call from Jon Favreau saying, 'I need the voice of a personality-less robot, and I thought of you immediately.' I thought that was the funniest thing I ever heard, so I said, 'Yes.'

I was bullied about everything, from the way I looked to the fact that my father had been a dancer.

I still read the British papers, but I've never been a Royalist, ever. It's funny, there always seems to be much more of a fascination with the Royal Family over here then there does in England.

You can end up living your life pretty incrementally, and that's boring.

Sure, you can do something frothy and ridiculous, but you should probably be confident that it's going to be a sure-fire hit. Then it's sensible, because it enables you to make smaller movies. But if you make something frothy and ridiculous that doesn't work, it's not worth it.

For some ungodly reason, I end up being naked in a lot of stuff. But there is a certain grace and kudos that come with taking your clothes off on the first day, a respect that is given by the rest of the cast.

No one I know works in the industry. No, that's not true - Liv Tyler.

I resist the idea of there being on-screen chemistry. I think it's something that people like to say without thinking.

The only thing I think I can be accused of about paparazzi is being really naive. I didn't think about it coming along with the job and I never, during my three years at drama school, fantasized about one bit of it.

Trying to be a good actor has to be involved with placing yourself imaginatively in different people's circumstances.

Actors can be many things - vain, venal, self-serving, obnoxious, bullies - but all of the good ones are great storytellers.

I feel safe in saying this, and that is that Peter Weir is without a doubt one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. I'd open a door in a movie for him if he asked me to.

In marriage, there's a lot of ignoring each other, which is hard to fake on-screen.

I really like telling stories. When I was a kid, I wanted to write songs. In quite a fundamental, gratifying, childish way, I enjoy the doing of telling a story.

I simply don't understand the refugee crisis. The history of humanity can be told through a story of migration and settlement. If I can't protect my family, I'm coming to where you are; I'm just coming. It's a round world, and we've all got to get on with it and move on.

Half of NYC's homeless populations are families.Homeless people have been ignored for too long. I'll just say this: If you are a family on the brink of eviction you are 80% less likely to get evicted if you have legal counsel. However, there is no right to legal counsel in housing court.It would cost the city $12,500 to grant that family legal counsel. Meanwhile, the average stay for a homeless family in a shelter once they have been evicted cost the city $45,000. So not only does it seem like the right thing to do morally, it's also the right thing to do fiscally.

The only way one can guarantee one's loyalty is love. Loyalty is beyond logic, really.

I still read the British papers, but I’ve never been a Royalist, ever. It’s funny, there always seems to be much more of a fascination with the Royal Family over here then there does in England.

Actors can be many things - vain, venal, self-serving, obnoxious, bullies - but all of the good ones are great storytellers. I wanted to watch what my actors were doing and how they were telling the story.

I learned so much about myself from reading this script and doing this movie [Shelter] because the level of judgment and the lack of humanity I saw in myself was disgusting. I never took into account what a homeless person might have been through.

My experience of people is that they are infinitely forgivable.

The world is split into two kinds of people, those who would go out for a drink with John Lennon, and those who`'d choose Paul McCartney... After The Beatles came back from India, Lennon wrote "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and McCartney wrote "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da." End of argument.

I think language is the most important thing that human beings have ever accomplished, and the only thing that's really going to get us all out of the troubles that we find ourselves in.

I was always waiting for the secret to be handed down to me. Ron Howard asked me what I was waiting for and I went, "Ron, I'm waiting to know the secret. I keep feeling there's some sort of secret that's going to passed on from a director." He went, "Oh no. There is none. You've just got to on and do it and make mistakes and figure it out."

I have an interest in giving people a cathartic experience, and making them look at homeless people differently, and making them question how they judge people, in general.

In a world of increasing grey areas, we are becoming more and more entrenched in black and white positions.

I have no interest in movies that take you somewhere dark and leave you there, for no reason.

I was brought up Catholic. I'm lapsed. From the age of three I was with the nuns. Now I'm an atheist.

I'm a guy who is married to an actress, who has three children, and lives in Tribeca. Where do you draw the line on what I am allowed to discuss?

I feel like the world we live in seems to be full of an increasingly grey area, but the culture that we live in seems to be getting really entrenched in black and white positions, and I think it's urgent to talk about that because it's going to kill us all.

I don't want to infantilize the actor; I want to empower the actor. Actors can be many things, but all of the really good ones are really great storytellers, and I'm interested in that. If you're not interested in that as a director then you better be Stanley Kurbrick.

I remember coming on my first set and it being a playground of things I wanted to ask questions about: cameras and lenses and what the lenses do, what's the focus puller doing and how does that work? Why is there less margin for error when there's less light? I was always asking questions and watching directors closely.