Top 64 Quotes & Sayings by Brian Cox
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Scottish actor Brian Cox.
Last updated on September 20, 2024.
I actually went to see 'Rushmore,' and I came late, and I missed myself. It was great, that scene. I caught that scene the other day on TV, funny enough, the first scene that you see with Jason Schwartzman and myself, where we talk about his grades. That's a brilliant scene, and I have to say, we play it brilliantly.
The heritage of a British actor revolves around the challenges of playing the classic roles to meet certain levels of success as an actor. In America, the heritage of an actor is based on cinema mainly.
Even the Australians don't know how beautiful their own country is. Particularly where we were shooting 'The Straits.' Most of my stuff was done on an aboriginal settlement on the south shore, opposite Cairns, which I believe was the site where the last person was eaten in Australia.
For me, it's just acting. It's pretending. The best actors are children, and children don't do research. You never see a child going, 'I'm wondering about my motivation here. How can I do this toy? How can I do this train? I don't feel train.'
The hardest thing to do in movies is be a day-part player. You have to go in, make your mark, and get out. There's a lot of leading actors who are not good for a lot of a movie, and then suddenly they have good moments, and they're like stepping-stones across a particularly feisty stream. They build careers out of that.
I'm 100% Celt. In fact, I'm directly related to the progenitor of the high kings of Ireland, Niall of the Nine Hostages.
I used to do a lot of fencing in the theater and a lot of horse riding in the early days, so I'm used to it in a way. If you're classically trained like I am, it's a little bit like mother's milk to me. I enjoy it.
My mother Molly had a nervous breakdown after my father Chic died, aged 50. He was a very generous man who ran a shop in Dundee giving a lot of people tick. When he died, a lot of people hadn't paid their bills, so he died with a lot of debt. After he died, my mother went doolally.
There's so much light in Broughty Ferry. I think the humour in Glasgow is darker, because it's much more gloomy, there's a perpetual misery there.
I've directed a couple of times in the theater, but I wouldn't make a habit of it because it's too consuming.
Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.
There is a history of mental breakdowns in my family. It will never happen to me but it has happened to others in the family.
I didn't have this feeling that I should be a leading actor in the cinema. And I wouldn't want the responsibility of the opening weekend.
As a boy, I was never interested in theater because I came from a working-class Scottish home. I thought, 'I want to do movies.' Then it was finding the means to do it.
Actors in general have become very spoiled in the roles they choose these days. When I first started in this profession - about a hundred years ago in the last century - it was all about taking risks, it was about doing the job and honing the craft.
The trouble with New York today is that it's lost its balance. I love the new, greener New York, but it takes all kinds of worlds to make a World.
In a sense I feel very much a part of the cinema now in a way where when I come back to the theater now I feel like a visitor. The cinema is really what I enjoy. I want to do more independent movies.
I come from a working class community in eastern Scotland, and I've always been a populist, though not a patronising populist.
Ah, there's a director. Astonishing, Spike Lee. A feisty guy, but a guy who's, I think, incredibly misunderstood. I think people review his politics or his color as opposed to his filmmaking sometimes. Because he's a wonderful, wonderful filmmaker and a lover of the art.
Charles Laughton, who's a great hero of mine, only ever made one film and it happens to be one of the great films ever, which is 'The Night of the Hunter.' It's full of his kind of imagination and creation and how you do things and just in the way he used the studio, I just thought it was a fantastical way of using the studio.
People always make that mistake when they talk about theatre - the notion of the 'theatrical' meaning something separate from life. If it doesn't relate to life, it doesn't relate to anything.
The fact is that Hollywood, from as early as the sixties to the present time, has ghettoized cinema into the big industry, a marketing industry. In doing this, the audiences have lost touch with the aspects of film which were to be informative and educational and even spiritual.
There are characters that have made me uncomfortable. I did a film called 'Rob Roy,' and I played Killearn, who was this sort of greasy fallen-angel character who was voyeuristic and sleazy and really unpleasant. It was a great role, but I didn't especially enjoy living with this awful man for the length of time it took to make the movie.
I think I must be the only British actor who's played both Stalin and Trotsky. I need to play Lenin so I can make it a triptych.
Unlike New Zealand, which has nothing especially predatory, Australia is full of spiders and crocodiles and all kinds of animals that will eat you and sting you.
I've always wanted to make a film.
I always think I look like the Elephant Man - I can't get used to my own image.
I was living in London and I thought, 'There's nothing here for me anymore.' I don't want to become this actor who's going to be doing this occasional good work in the theater and then ever diminishing bad television. I thought I'd rather do bad movies than bad television because you get more money for it.
The problem is that the U.K. in essence is a feudal society. It's everyone in their place.
I enjoy acting now more than I ever have. I've had lots of difficult times when I was younger, but that was all tied up with thwarted ambition. It's hard being a young actor, because you don't realise until later that it's only ever about doing the work.
I did a film in which Andy Garcia and Michael Keaton both played the leads, 'Desperate Measures,' and interestingly enough it was their biggest payday. The film didn't do well, and it kind of marked their careers. They've done less since. It all changed.
Every carbon atom in every living thing on the planet was produced in the heart of a dying star.
An explorer of the universe is sexier than a musician.
At every stage of understanding the universe better, the benefits to civilisation have been immeasurable. None of those big leaps were made with us knowing what was going to happen.
If people don’t have an understanding of what science is and what scientists do, then they can tend to think that global warming, for example, is just a matter of opinion.
Science is too important not to be a part of popular culture.
Deeper understanding confers that most precious thing - wonder.
You dig deeper and it gets more and more complicated, and you get confused, and it's tricky and it's hard, but... It is beautiful.
The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!
What scientists are attached to is journeys into the unknown and discovering things that are completely unexpected and baffling and surprising.
For the first time, we saw our world, not as a solid, immovable, kind of indestructible place, but as a very small, fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space.
(On the energy radiated by the Sun) It's four hundred million million million million watts. That is a million times the power consumption of the United States every year, radiated in one second, and we worked that out by using some water, a thermometer, a tin, and an umbrella. And that's why I love physics.
One might say science is the sum total of our knowledge of the universe, the great library of the known, but the practice of science happens at the border between the known and the unknown. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we peer into the darkness with eyes opened not in fear but in wonder.
Science is about exploring, and the only way to uncover the secrets of the universe is to go and look.
There is so much left of it to explore.
When you fall into a black hole you will be literally spaghettified.
Climate change: Don't undermine the science just because you don't like the economics
Science is different to all other systems of thought because you dont need faith in it, you can check that it works.
In science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that have yet to be shown to be false.
The story of the universe finally comes to an end. For the first time in its life, the universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy finally stops increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disordered. Nothing happens, and it keeps not happening, forever. It's what's known as the heat-death of the universe. An era when the cosmos will remain vast and cold and desolate for the rest of time the arrow of time has simply ceased to exist. It's an inescapable fact of the universe written into the fundamental laws of physics, the entire cosmos will die.
We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.
When we look out into space, we are looking into our own origins, because we are truly children of the stars.
We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets.
Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past.
As we get older, things seem less important.
The aim of particle physics is to understand what everything’s made of, and how everything sticks together. By everything I mean me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything.
Skepticism must go hand in hand with rationality. When theories are shown to be false, the correct thing to do is to move on.
Don't undermine the science just because you don't like the economics. That's a dangerous slope, because the problem of course is you're not undermining just that, you're undermining the basis of rational decision-making in society.
No one gets teased for being a geek anymore- science is the new rock n roll
It would be wonderful if ideas could be the new rock 'n roll
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