Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by Stanley Tucci

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American actor Stanley Tucci.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Stanley Tucci

Stanley Tucci Jr. is an American actor and filmmaker. Involved in acting from a young age, he made his film debut in John Huston's Prizzi's Honor (1985), and continued to play a variety of supporting roles in films such as Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry (1997), Sam Mendes's Road to Perdition (2002), and Steven Spielberg's The Terminal (2004). In 1996, he made his directorial debut with the cult comedy Big Night which he also co-wrote and starred in alongside Tony Shalhoub. He also played Stanley Kubrick in the television film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. Tucci is also known for his collaborations with Meryl Streep in films such as The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and Julie & Julia (2009). Tucci gained further acclaim and success with such films as Burlesque (2010), Easy A (2010), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Margin Call (2011), The Hunger Games film series (2012–2015), Spotlight (2015), Beauty and the Beast (2017), and Supernova (2020).

I make time to write.
I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid.
I like to see how I can do it for less money. — © Stanley Tucci
I like to see how I can do it for less money.
I would rather just do the things I want to do.
As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.
The thing is, I'm a very practical filmmaker.
I never go overbudget on my movies.
I like to use all of myself, and acting wasn't doing that.
You don't want to watch people who are really awful. That's the goal whenever you're playing someone who's a little twisted. One of the important aspects of this is we just don't know who he is. Or who she is. And we find out along the way.
The majority of directors I've worked with didn't know how to talk to actors.
Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk - and collect it.
I'm a control freak. Totally.
I write in the mornings. During my down time. — © Stanley Tucci
I write in the mornings. During my down time.
I have consciously not taken the role of a gangster, which has been offered to me far too many times.
My late wife - she died of cancer. We tried everything we could do to save her. I wish that I could have done more and that I could have been with her at the moment she passed away. I couldn't be in that room because I knew it would be so devastating that I wouldn't be able to take care of the kids after.
I don't consider myself a mean person. I hope I'm not.
I don't like to move the camera that much anyway.
I was dissatisfied just being an actor.
It's more interesting because you get to research the history of the period, and all the different aesthetic elements that make a film, particularly this film, so stunning.
I can remember the World's Fair in New York in 1964; I was three.
I live in London, and I spend a lot of time in England and have a lot of British friends.
And I love doing my own projects; that's what I've always wanted to do.
People wear shorts to the Broadway theater. There should be a law against that.
I didn't know you had to change diapers so often. I couldn't believe it - we must change them 10 times a day - each. So that's 20 diapers a piece a day.
I'd read Up in the Old Hotel, and I wanted to do something with Mitchell's stuff for a long time.
Even The Impostors, as silly as it is, is a very intimate film, in a way.
So yes, I hope to act in other people's movies, big and small, because that's how I make my living, really.
I'm not saying they won't be bigger projects someday.
Sometimes it's difficult directing yourself on film because you can't quite separate yourself from the subject.
I love directing - it's always so involving, so challenging.
My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.
Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote.
I'm not interested in wasting money on a project.
I don't like not being busy.
I'm actually one who will encourage directors to cut my lines.
You gotta make the movie you want to make.
When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.
I wanted to be an architect, an artist, or an actor. — © Stanley Tucci
I wanted to be an architect, an artist, or an actor.
But usually I'll wake up and start writing about nine o'clock. I'll probably write for about three hours, and I'll do that over the next month and a half.
I was always attracted to the past as a kid.
I've always considered myself an actor first and foremost.
I would love to have my hair back and to be two inches taller - I am 5 ft. 8 in.
The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.
I mean, Scorsese's a genius, and that's one way of shooting.
As a director you have to be careful you don't over-design the film. You have to be careful that the period aspect does not take over.
Those moments in between the moments, those are the most interesting. What's unspoken, the way we talk around things, the way our actions are inconsistent with what we're feeling, how anger and affection manifest themselves in strange ways at inappropriate times.
If you find that thing you love, it doesn't necessarily matter whether you do it well or not-you just need to do it.
As a film director I like to have the actors create their own close-ups. It's an older style of filmmaking. — © Stanley Tucci
As a film director I like to have the actors create their own close-ups. It's an older style of filmmaking.
Ripe bananas are the mark of a good produce section. A good produce section is the mark of a superior grocery store. A superior grocery store is the mark of a good man.
Sometimes we all make relationships more complicated than they necessarily have to be.
There is a joke that I use all the time. I say it to my kids. I used to say it to my wife. She'd be talking to me about something very serious and then I would just look at her and go "Where are you from originally?" And she would go "Humphhh! C'mon. That's terrible!"
As soon as the actor steps into the role, you probably can cut 50% of the lines because there's a person there now. And what a person does with their eyes, with their mouth, with their hands, the way they walk into a room, you can probably cut half the scene.
I think it's important to have a good sense of humor and joke around with your kids. That's what I do a lot.
I think everybody has a little bit of an asshole inside of them.
If you feel safe then you can go wherever you want to go as an actor.
[Hollywood] studios are handing out money to make independent films now, but they all want the same thing. They want the style and the deadpan delivery of RESERVOIR DOGS or FARGO and so they imitate those movies. They want PULP FICTION, but they get it all wrong! They get the detachment, but that's it. And then it's all about style, and in the end what do you learn about the characters? Nothing. You learn you wasted two hours.
Every character, no matter who you play, at times is pretending to be somebody else. People have a public face and a private face.
It's different if you're a painter. You can hidethe ones that don't work. You can't do that with movies. They tellthe story of who you are at the time, and that's the wonderful thingabout it.
You have to be serious about what you do but you mustn't take yourself seriously. That way you'll be happier and ultimately you'll be more successful. You'll be better at what you do.
A dream that you don't fight for can haunt you for the rest of your life.
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