Top 211 Quotes & Sayings by Christopher Walken - Page 4

I got [Muhammad Ali's boxing shorts] for $40 at an auction. Nobody wanted them. I have them framed in my house.

Of course they may have corrected it by now, but the original titles at the end of Annie Hall say "Christophe Vlaken." It was just inconceivable. These things are checked...I don't know what that was about. I'd never seen or heard of it. How they came up with the name Christophe Vlaken, it must've been a conspiracy. I did ask about it but nobody knew.

I suppose in order to succeed at something you have to be very persistent. I've never done that.

All actors do what they do differently, and it doesn't matter.

Sometimes a certain innocence is good, but not about yourself.

As an actor I'm rather hit and miss, I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't. But this is a nice part.

You never forget how to dance. It's just a matter of your bones working and things like that.

I got to playing villains-I don't know how. I think it's like anything else, in the movies in particular that if you establish yourself as something and you're lucky enough to keep getting hired. You know, there are guys who play the guy who gets the girl, guys who are the best friend of that guy, there's the funny guy, the villain.

It's very hard to get a movie made. You could spend your life reading scripts that never got made.

I get a lot of invitations, and sometimes it's far away, it's in Montana or something. "We'd like you to come to our daughter's wedding." These are people I've never heard of. I get a lot that. "Will you come to my son's graduation?" No...I guess when you're in stuff, it's almost a feeling that they know you.

I don't have kids. Maybe that's kept me young. I have a wife for almost 50 years and she looks after me a little bit like I was seven years-old.

I grew up in music theater playing to the audience - singing and dancing and showing off. That's really my background. But the camera's different. I think I'm more at home on stage.

In the theater you rehearse for a minimum of five to six weeks. And then you get to play it. Which means you get to get better. That's the great thing about the theater.

I've made a couple of movies in the jungle, and I don't want to go back to the jungle.

Too many young actors are strutting about and doing films without having developed some of the depth you need to bring off certain kinds of roles. I think that's the problem with the system, where a lot of younger actors who haven't had a chance to develop suddenly become stars.

For me, in movies, it's always a mixed bag. I've never made a movie where I thought, "You were really good in that movie; you were good all the time." No. It's always, "You didn't get it, you didn't do it in that scene, but the other scene is pretty good." So I just hope that in balance there's more good scenes than not.

I became an actor kind of by accident. I was in musical theater and I got a job as an actor in a play and kept going. But I never set out to be an actor; it happened over time.

My background is in musical comedy.

It takes a very long time to read a script. I'll look at a script, but there are so many scripts. I remember once being at the dentist, and the guy was doing my teeth and telling me about the screenplay he'd written and he said, "Will you read it?" And I said "Oh...okay." And it turns out that it was about a dentist!

When I'm on the road making a movie in another city, on my day off, I always go to the movies. I love going to the movies. You get a ticket and sit there, and it's very interesting to be around people who aren't personally invested in you, in any way. They're just going to the movies.

There are certain directors where you know you're going to be good or you're not going to be there. There are people where you kind of know that if you miss the mark then it'll probably not be in the movie and that's very reassuring.

I've made quite a number of movies that I've never even seen and I've made some movies that I thought were good that nobody saw... Sometimes they end up on television.

I've never made a movie I wasn't surprised to see.

A man can be an artist... in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasey's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece.

I don't think I'd be a good director because people would ask me, you know, "What is it? What's going on here? Where should I put the camera?" Or, "What's my motivation?" And I would say, "Do whatever you want!"

I have boxes full of stuff. Most actors do have a trunk full of stuff, paintings or scripts. It never comes to anything.

Older actors, and women in particular, are getting more opportunities. It pleases me, its very good news for us. They say that people are living longer, and maybe it's just that there's more of us out there.

When I was a teenager and all these shows were on I was in that business, so I knew a lot of people in the theaters and I saw many of the great shows many times. I would go in and stand in the back - they would let me in, they knew me. I saw Fiddler on the Roof, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Gypsy, and Funny Girl many times just standing in the back.

I'm a better actor now than I ever was, I wish I could have hurried that up, but there's no way. Anyway, I always wanted to be around for a long time. Like a European actor, I hope I live a long time and that I'm acting until I finish.

I became an actor by accident.

Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. I never know how successful a movie is going to be - when you make a movie you're always hoping for the best.