Kevin Spacey
31 quotes
Biography
Kevin Spacey Fowler is an American actor. Known for his work on stage and screen, he has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Tony Award, and two Laurence Olivier Awards as well as nominations for twelve Primetime Emmy Awards.
"Edward Norton and I have known each other awhile. I just think he's the real deal, supremely talented and smart. He's got a great sense of humor."
"Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get."
"Well, whoever Keyser Söze is, I can tell you he is going to get gloriously drunk tonight."
"Dianne, thank you for teaching me about caring about the right things, and I love you."
"Sometimes the person who is the most logical is the person whom we call insane."
"I mean, my mother knows. Or thinks she knows. Or supposes. Or suspects. I told her I was writing a story on Kevin Spacey, and she said, “Well, I hear he’s gay.” Now, you must understand some things about my mom. She is eighty years old and lives in a condominium in Florida. Although she loves movies—especially dark and intricate mysteries, which she calls “murders,” as in “You know how I like a good murder”—she has no connection to the movie business and has never, to my knowledge, outed anyone before. “Ma, where did you hear that?” “At the pool.” Of course—the pool. It is shocking what kind of knowledge is forced upon our parents—what kind of innocence is lost—at the pools of America. It is shocking, indeed, to imagine how many of America’s pools had to learn Kevin Spacey’s supposed secret before the supposed secret reached my mother’s pool and the grasp of her saintly and intrepid ears. One imagines the information—if information is what it is—creeping across the nation, from Hollywood to Florida, pool by pool, sort of like the dogged swimmer of Cheever’s short story, until at last an entire nation of moviegoers comes to hold Kevin Spacey under suspicion, until at last our own suspicion is all we know of him, all we have of him, all that’s left of him. It was not as surprising, though, to hear my mother repeat a rumor she’d heard about Kevin Spacey as it was to hear ostensible sophisticates in New York and Los Angeles repeat the very same rumor, as though my mother, on this count, were truly in the know; as though we have become unanimous in what we’ve heard, homogenized even to the extent of our access to secrets; as though the only thing one could possibly say about Kevin Spacey is what everyone else has already said, which is that he is supposed to be very smart, that he is supposed to be very private, that he is supposed to be extraordinarily committed to the protection and development of his extraordinary gifts as an actor, and that he is supposed to be gay. And that is all he’s supposed to be, by advance billing; that is it. He is one of our culture’s usual suspects, and, like the character he played in the movie of that name, he is both narrowed by our suspicions and set free by them, sprung by them, for he is an actor, and when all we know of an actor is that we don’t quite trust him, don’t quite believe him, then he is free to become whatever he wants to become, which, in the case of Kevin Spacey, is a movie star."
"If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!"
"Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higer the fences get."
"I went through a period of great rebellion within my family, when I was about 9 or 10. I was mad, I had no focus, had no real interest in anything, and so I started to do things that were just rebellious and stupid."
"Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected."
"I find it sad that by not talking about who I sleep with, that makes me mysterious. There was a time when I would have been called a gentleman."
"Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higer the fences get."
"After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley."
"There are ways in which you can make sure that even if people come to the theatre because they know an actor or actress, by the end, they've forgotten that, and they leave going, 'Wow - what an amazing play.'"
"As long as we, in the United States, continue to insist that our politicians have to spend all of their time raising millions of dollars for television ads, it will be corrupt. If we leave it up to the politicians to clean up lobbying and finance reform, nothing is going to change."
"It's a great thriller or mystery, but on another level it's a film about the fact that, if you only look at a person through one lens, or only believe what you're told, you can often miss the truth that is staring you in the face."
"Maybe there are people who are gamers who haven't seen movies I have made, or the movies I have made have made no impression on them at all."
"It's always the big question in our lives if you have a lot of success. What do you do with it? Buy more houses, buy more cars, buy more stuff, be wealthy and distant and unengaged? Or do you take all that good fortune that has come towards you and spread the love, do something with it?"
"My life will change, because I want it to change; and also because this is something I'm committed to doing and that I believe my life has been leading towards."
"I'm not someone who's led my life trying to get publicity I'd rather do my work and go home."
"Storytelling helps us understand each other, translate the issues of our times, and the tools of theater and film can be powerful in helping young people to develop communication/collaboration skills, let alone improving their own confidence."
"We gotta be willing to let it hurt. You know, all this notion that acting is “yeah it’s pretend” and yes we enjoy it and yeah we can have a good time with it. But if you wanna LAND, you wanna make an impact, you want those FUCKERS TO REMEMBER YOU! Then you have to let it hurt sometimes. You gotta get there because that’s all an audience ever wants. Is for you to open up your chest and show them that you have a fucking heart. That’s all we want. A heart. A human being. Not an affectation."
"My mother always, always, always thought that I was going to be famous. Thought that I was going to win Oscars. In fact, I believe I accepted the Oscar as a ketchup bottle many a time in front of my mother in the kitchen. 'I'd like to thank the Academy,' I said with a ketchup bottle."
"I certainly identify with the role of mentor and, to some degree, maybe teacher. I do a lot of work with kids at the Old Vic."
"I like being able to go to a local pub and have great food and particularly love pubs that welcome my dogs."