Alec Baldwin
22 quotes
Biography
"I was never really in love with acting. I always love movies and going to the theater. But did I love being in this business? Not for five minutes. I did it because I needed a job. For the first year or two, it's like a poison that enters your body. It's like a virus, and your body has to release antidotes. But it would be very unfair to say that it's that way all the time. It's just like anything this overwhelming that you enter suddenly. It's like being a contact at West Point. You're thrown into an intense environment. From the word go, you realize it's sink or swim."
"Democrats of the seventies and eighties are too tolerant, too open-minded, not feral enough. I want to be a ferocious liberal."
"My dad turned 40 in October 1967 … in April '68 Martin Luther King was killed. In June '68 Robert Kennedy was killed. And in the fall of '68, my dad's mother died. He was left, on an existential level, saying, "This is what I am. I've got the love of my students and I've got nothing else. My country is going to hell." After 1968, he was never the same again. All the air went out of him."
"I was in love when I was married to Kim Basinger, I’m not ashamed to say. I used to wake up in the morning and just look at her and say 'What do you want for breakfast, baby? Special K with blueberries? Let me go get some.'"
"The wealthy don't have any sense of humor. It's not like the English, where the theater is perhaps the one place where they have a sense of humor about themselves."
"My brothers were funny, and there was a lot of shtick and comedy and nastiness and violence and fighting and sports."
"Morning Joe was boring. Scarborough is neither eloquent nor funny."
"There's three things: there's masculinity, there's intelligence, there's sensitivity. You've got to bring those three things to a leading man's role: masculinity, sensitivity, intelligence. In some people, there's a little too much in the mix of one or the other."
"I collect travel alarm clocks. I was in a flea market in France once, in 1994, and I opened up this beautiful Jaeger-LeCoultre folding eight-day winding clock folded into a beautiful case, and I went, 'Wow, man.' And I've been collecting travel alarm clocks since 1994."
"I'm doing 'Rock of Ages' one day, making out with Russell Brand. Soon after that, I'm advocating with Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Cynthia Nixon for marriage equality."
"The campaign finance scandal in America is the global warming of American political life - with cash substituting for deadly solar radiation."
"There are some times when you make films and you travel places, and the take that people in the business have is that the worst way to see a city is to shoot there, because you work these long 12, 13 and 14-hour days, and you go home to the hotel, you eat, and you pass out."
"Success begets success. I've been offered a lot of movies now that '30 Rock' has been successful."
"My life, in some ways, has been a half-measure. I didn't commit myself all the way to my marriage and family, because I would have given up more. And I didn't go all the way with just being completely selfish. I always wonder where my career would be if I was more selfish."
"I had a marriage that I came to in the same way everybody else comes to a marriage. We all take chances when we get married."
"As my friend said to me, when you have children, typically in a second marriage, when you're older and you get married again to a woman who would have children, you must always remember that you make sure the children attend a college where the commencement ceremonies are held in a facility with a wheelchair accessible ramp."
"Men are literally lying in bed with their wives when the marriage is essentially over, thinking, 'I've got to get the hell out of here', and have a fantasy woman in mind. Then you get divorced, meet a woman, marry her, and by the time all that goes by, you've aged a few years and are ready to go back to your ex-wife."
"I think Jerry Lee is sad. As a musician, he was far more talented than Elvis Presley. Everybody down in Memphis knows that. Elvis became a movie star because he was beautiful. Not that Elvis wasn't talented, but Jerry Lee Lewis was incomprehensibly talented as a musician."
"My wife is the greatest person I have ever known. She is just a living doll; she is great person and a great mom. We have a girl and a boy, and we are going to have another boy."
"I know some people who live this much more insulated life in Los Angeles, where their feet never touch public ground. They walk out of their bathroom, their living room, they get into their garage, their car, and the next thing you know, they're at the valet parking of the restaurant or the store or the office. They're in a bubble the whole time."
"Everything I hated about L.A. I'm beginning to crave. L.A. is a place where you live behind a gate, you get in a car, your interaction with the public is minimal. I used to hate that."
"Hollywood studios bury that stuff - actors who punch directors in the face and try to run producers over with cars - insanity, criminal behavior. But the studios are invested in that star, they can't have that person's name dirtied up."