Michael Shannon Quotes
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It's obviously a lot harder to try and be a good guy than it is to be a bad guy. The world is a fundamentally evil place, it seems like. So in order to be a good person, you have to fight temptation and vice.
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Inevitably people will get tired of me. People get tired of everyone except Jimmy Stewart. I'm not saying Jimmy Stewart would get tired of me, I'm just saying people will never get tired of Jimmy Stewart.
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I know this'll sound obnoxious, but acting was very much an accident for me. I didn't have, like, posters of Marlon Brando in my bedroom when I was growing up.
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The magic word for me is pumpernickel. I love pumpernickel. I must have some Russian blood in me because I could just eat pumpernickel and raw onions.
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I have been acting for over 20 years and I started in the smallest little theater that you can possibly imagine and then I very slowly built myself to this point. So it is never like there is this real sharp change or something that really startled me. It has just been very gradual.
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What I'm angry about, and I've gone on record saying this, is I think that financiers get away with murder. They realize they can get something for nothing and they won't settle for anything else. There's something called a Schedule F. If I work for a Schedule F contract that basically means I'm doing the movie for free because by the time I pay all my commissions and taxes there's barely anything left for me to live on. This whole notion that you do work that you love for very little money and then you go out and do something you hate to make money.
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If you don't fight the system, you can either take advantage of the system or let the system take advantage of you.
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One of the great things about acting is you can do things that in real life would get you in trouble. I think that's something I figured out pretty early on.
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I like to play characters that get to do it all - to have a bit of comedy here and a bit of pathos here and a bit of suspense here, that's what's fun.
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I just keep working on things I like, and hope for the best. I hope people enjoy them.
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If you don't believe there's some organising principle, or somebody up in the sky pulling the strings, then it can be very stressful. And nature itself is very arbitrary - it's not malevolent or benevolent; it doesn't even know we're here.
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You got to know what's worth keeping and what's worth letting go.
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Well, I think anybody who's had a baby can tell you that once you have a baby, they kind of become the main focus. I don't think there's gonna be a lot of room for anything else.
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If you give me enough time, enough leash, I can become pretty reasonable.
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A lot of times the characters I play tend to be kind of loners or they don't have best friends or best buddies.
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One thing I'm a big fan of is the theater of the absurd. That's what I come from, that's what I love to do more than anything. What I love about absurdity is the words "comedy" and "drama" get thrown out the window and it's just life, which is absurd.
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I'll tell you what's funny about it [NSA wiretapping]: They tell us we got to cut the budget; we have to have budget rollback. We're going to cut the budget on air traffic control, and every once in a while your plane is going to be delayed for three hours. But we do have the money laying around to hire people to read your emails and listen to your phone conversations. That just doesn't make any friggin' sense at all.
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The stage is a routine. It keeps you grounded, like a metronome. I find that soothing.
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People don't go to the movies to get the news, people don't go to the movies to learn a lesson. People go to the movie to get an emotional experience.
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Design is the fundamental creative activity with which we direct our lives, and collectively, the earth's transformation from its original, natural state into our human-made world.
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It's a little bit odd. The first time you do the play, you kind of throw yourself into it, trying to get the most out of all the individual moments. Then, a few hours later, you're still there, wondering what you could possibly do differently than what you just did a couple hours ago.
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I certainly don't want to have too many pre-conceived notions before I show up because then you might be cutting yourself off from the real lessons of what is going on.
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Plenty of people are onto the emptiness but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
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People are morons. I don't do any social media stuff. I have people telling me all the time, "You should do Twitter, you should do this, you should get on Facebook." Are you insane? I'm not doing any of that crap. I stay the hell off that thing. Every once in a while, I send a business email, and that's it.