Top 194 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Hiddleston - Page 3

The thing about running is, if I run in the morning before work, I feel like I'm ahead of the day. Whatever work I've done in terms of preparation or research or thinking about the scene or the character, it all kind of crystallizes in that moment in the morning. And sometimes I have the best ideas then.

Whenever I come back to London, which is home, I get that cosy, comfortable feeling of being home, as well as the sophistication of this city.

I'm an actor, and part of my joy and my curiosity about the job that I do, is that actors have the privilege of exploring human nature in different ways.

I have been allowed to inhabit different shades of human nature and different colours of truth indifferent circumstances.

Somehow the past is a safe place to explore our collective cultural neuroses.

Everybody is great and the chemistry is different with everyone. That is the joy of acting - you really don't know how it is going to go until you turn up. It's like playing tennis, you can't plan for the match you are going to play until you are actually up against your opponent and what happens, happens. That is the joy of being on set.

The learning is the heavy lifting. You need to get the words into your brain.

What le Carré is so good at is unpicking something very specific about Englishness. That is almost part of why I think he wrote the novel. You can feel le Carré's anger that someone who has had the benefits of an English education and an English upbringing is using that privilege to basically do the worst things imaginable. There is an anger in the book about that.

Within us there is the capacity of being anyone or anything

As an actor, it's much, much easier to be really nasty to someone that you really like.

As a citizen, you have a duty to ask what is true and what is false.

As a child, I had a deck of Marvel top trumps. You can get top trumps with racing cars, or fighter planes, or football players... I had all of the Marvel superheroes and super-villains you could get, and I used to play them with my friends. They were all listed according to their height and weight and agility and their super-powers.

I truly think any preparation you do only helps and adds dimension and complexity to the work [as an actor].

Once you've seen certain things, the moral compunction drives you to act.

I think that is so interesting. It is le Carré. There must be so much of him when he was younger. He's an interesting character. I don't want to say the word "passive" because there is something very active about the way he is passive, if that makes any sense: the nature of his watching and his listening is active. It is always so alive because he is, essentially, a spy.

Vietnam is absolutely breathtaking. I've never been to that part of the world before and it is an area of such natural beauty.

We're travelling through space and time, we're dealing with gods and monsters, but at the heart of the film, from my perspective, is a family - a father, two sons, two brothers, a mother and the fractious, intimate interaction that they have.

Everywhere there is inequality, everywhere there is division, and I worry about it. I think everybody does.

For the first 10 minutes after you meet them, they have the wattage and charisma of movie stars. Then you have a coffee with them and you realize we're all the same, we're all just people. All of the actors in The Avengers are so nice. Marvel has these code names for projects and the code name for The Avengers was Group Hug. It felt very much like a group hug on set.

I'm sure favorite moments in movies are things that just happen accidentally when the camera is there. You have to do all the homework to get yourself into the period, the costumes, the style, the voice, the hairdo or whatever it is, but once you've done all that work, you have to kind of let it go and just be there. If you're always thinking about it, it just looks a bit over-thought.

The character, as written on the page, is just a blueprint for a human being.

The 60s had completely changed how people conceived of their lives and their habits and their identities.

It's a rare thing when you can read a script in one sitting and you haven't looked at the watch or you've gone to make a cup of tea.

I find that, when I'm working, if I start the day with a run - outside, not in a gym, but just me out there in the elements, with only my own legs to propel me forward... It's something to do with just being in the world and getting out of my own head.

Out of 10 how enthusiastic a dancer am I? 11

My instinct is to keep people guessing. I think as an actor your greatest strength is your versatility, I suppose. The blanker the canvas, the easier it is to project the illusion of a character onto it. I think there are many actors who do that very successfully.

I've always loved King Kong. He's like a modern-day myth, an icon of the cinema.

I even feel grateful for the failures.

Honestly, I’m happiest when I’m with my best friend and we’re just laughing about life and times, there is nothing greater than friendship in this world. And that kind of sort of mutual acceptance ; to feel known and understood by people and to feel like you know and understand them back is all you can ask for.

I never get afraid of things. I only get excited.

I definitely go through periods where I'm in a particular mood, or there's a consistent imaginative context that I feel I'm in, and I'm drawn to certain things. I can sometimes feel it when I'm moving away from something that I was once interested in - an idea or an exploration of particular relationships. I go, 'Well, I think I've done that and I don't want to do it again.'

I think the early years, the first decade of your life, is the most formative in a way.

I am so profoundly aware of my lack of skill to make any material difference. I am not a doctor. I can't influence foreign policy. I can't build schools. I can't chemically engineer the protein paste that helps people with acute malnutrition. But I can talk about it, and so can you.

Truth in drama is elusive. You never quite find it, but the search for it is compulsive.

You can’t really legislate for the decisions that your heart makes.

I loved adventure movies. I loved movies where people went on an adventure to an unknown land, an undiscovered country, or a new territory. I think there's something, right at the center of storytelling, that people love about that.

I would always play the baddie, incidentally.

People love escapism and there should be a place for it.

What I learned in Guinea is that we are all responsible for the state of our world. The world - and the system by which we trade, share, cooperate and conflict - is clearly not working. We are only as strong as our weakest members. UNICEF is run at every level by strong, relentlessly energetic, deeply capable people who use that strength, energy and capability to help those who need it most: the weakest, most disadvantaged women and children of our world. All I can do now is help make people aware of what is happening, of what they are doing. That is all that I can do. For now.

The best comedy is always played straight down the middle.

I always wanted to see what America was like. I had that curiosity in my 20s when I was working in the theatre here [ in London]... there was the mystery of LA and I wondered what happened over there. I wanted to go and check it out and I'm pleased that I have.

The difference between a hero and a villain is that they just make different choices.

I fear looking back and wishing I had done things I hadn't.

Fame is weird and amorphous and unpredictable.

I think, actually, that it's a really fascinating time in history because the development of modern technology and the photographs the satellites were taking from space were mapping the earth in a new way, making us feel like the globe we inhabit is much smaller than previously conceived of, in the human mind.

I’m not a big fan of the class system, to be honest. It feels ugly to me. If you’ve got something to say and the work is good, it doesn’t matter where you come from

I do sort of believe that in life all manifestations of evil usually come from an emotional place. They come from some kind of emotional heartbreak or some psychological damage. I'm not a psychologist and that's probably for the best but I am interested in it.

If you can run around the corner and say hello to someone do that instead of emailing. It's always more rewarding; the connection is always more authentic. If you've got something to say and you can say it someone's face, it's so much better, healthier.

The world I've grown into at the moment is becoming increasingly more disturbing and unsettling.

I think there's a part of all of us that wonders how we would survive on an island untouched by Man. Even better, an island untouched by Man and inhabited by King Kong.

Well, I don't know. When I signed my contract, I signed to play Loki in five more Marvel movies, but they were unspecified. So, if there will be more movies or not remains to be seen, but I like the idea of Loki turning up in the shadows when people least expect him, but you never know these things, the world changes and the things change, but I feel like I know who Loki is, so I wouldn't mind.

Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorising them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

I don't want to be quoted as 'Tom Hiddleston, psychologist says...' But there is a psychological aspect to being an actor. We are particular students of human nature - not every actor is, of course, but that's what fascinates me about being an actor.

Thor and Loki are defined by each other.

The bit I love is I really love acting, really, and the circus of being a celebrity is something I'm sort of not interested in. I find it strange.

We should just thank each other for our time. For the rest of our lives.

Quite often, most of us are defined first by our vital statistics - our sex, our height, our weight, the colour of our eyes and then we're defined by our job.

There is so much poverty and desperation in South Sudan, and yet each side is militarily equipped.

Acting is a bit like tennis in that you can't really do it on your own.

An ant has no quarrel with a boot.