Quotes

Over the years, and just like all celebrities, Christopher Walken has been in many different interviews. On this page you can find some of his most famous quotes. They can give you an insight into the person behind the actor … these are his thoughts:

• “Acting has to do with saying it as if you meant it, so for me the words are always very important. It’s very important for me to know my lines, know them so well that I don’t have to think about them.”
• “Also for me it was different because I play a lot of villains and in this one I play a dad and I play a good guy, basically. He’s the Secretary of the Treasury. I never had a job like that.”
• “Also, I think there are huge reactions sometimes, which are also mysterious.”
  
• “An actor really is a kind of intermediary between an audience and the piece, whether it’s a play or movie.”
• (about his rare innocent role in the 2007 film Hairspray) “In most of the movies I’ve done, I don’t get the girl. In this particular case, I happen to get the girl, and it’s John Travolta!”
  
• ”And I think that when I play these villains, maybe what is different is that the audience sees me play these and they know that that’s Chris and he’s having fun and he knows that and he knows that and you know that and everybody knows that.”
  
• ”As an actor you become that lighting rod between the person who made the play and the audience.”
• “Everybody has to be a little lucky, I think.”
•  (from an SNL skit with Blue Oyster Cult) “I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell.”
• ”I don’t carry lucky charms, but I believe in those things.”
• “I’ve always been a character actor, although I’m not quite sure what that means. All my scripts are absolutely covered in notes, so any time I say anything - even `pass the salt’ - I have six subtexts, comments on what I really mean when I’m saying that. Maybe that’s what gives the impression that I’m saying one thing and thinking something else.”
• ”I live sort of in the country and I like that. It’s very quiet, it’s beautiful.”
• “I have been in movies that I thought I wasn’t very good in. I think, Chris, don’t let your mouth hang open like that next time. Look at that facial tic. Don’t walk in such a self-conscious way! But sometimes, I watch myself and I think that I am terrific - and that is really nice.”
• ”I remember that. I was talking to him and I said how great it would be if actors had a tail because I have animals and a tail is so expressive. On a cat you can tell everything. You can tell if they’re annoyed. You can tell whether they’re scared.”
• “I think early on I knew what I was going to do and it was based a lot on familiarity but it was also because I didn’t have a lot of skills. There was nothing I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be a doctor. I wanted to be in show business.”
• ”I think if you do something effectively whether you’re the lover or the comic or the action guy or the villain like I play; movies are very expensive to make. Chances are you’ll get asked to play that part again.”
• ”I think that if I had grown up and had been in show business and the movies twenty five, thirty years earlier, I think I would have made a lot more musical movies.”
• (on how he selects his roles) “I don’t choose that much. I just sort of take what’s there. I don’t have much else to do. I don’t have a lot of hobbies. I don’t play golf. I don’t have any children. Things that occupy people’s time. I just try to take jobs. I basically work so much because I’m lazy.”
• “I think that sometimes when they see me in a movie they expect me to be something nasty. I mean, I play a lot of villains and you show up and they think maybe… That’s why it’s good to defy expectations sometimes.”
• “I think that weddings have probably been crashed since the beginning of time. Cavemen crashed them. You go to meet girls. It makes sense.”
• “I try not to worry about things I can’t do anything about.”
• “I was already 35 years old, and I’d been in show business for 30-plus years, and suddenly there was this big movie and I was getting an Oscar, and this enormous thing happened. In Annie Hall, I played the strange brother who wanted to drive into oncoming cars. Immediately after that was The Deer Hunter , where I played this nice guy who shoots himself in the head. Something happened there. The fact that they came so close together, and they were both important movies, two big public things where I was simultaneously… ‘disturbed.’ That got the ball rolling for me in terms of being an actor.”
• “People think that my favorite roles to do are villains, but I find comedy to be the most challenging and rewarding.”
• “I’d love to do a character with a wife, a nice little house, a couple of kids, a dog, maybe a bit of singing, and no guns and no killing, but nobody offers me those kind of parts.”
• “I’m not much of an analyzer or a psychologist.”
• “I’ve made movies that we’re very successful that we’re a complete surprise, and I’ve made movies that I thought we’re going to be very successful that, you know.”
• “I’ve made three musical movies which is pretty good considering that not many are made but I was lucky in other ways. I came along when independent movies were starting to boom.”
• “I’ve never crashed a wedding. When I was a kid I, of course, used to crash parties. Crashing a wedding is difficult though because you have to have the suit, and you have to have information in case someone catches you. You have to know at least some names and something.”
• “My father passed away a couple of years ago, but he was very old. He was almost a 100 years old. And, you know, he had a very good life. He came to America and he had a good life.”
• “My favorite characters are the ones that are the most successful movies.”
• (on Pulp Fiction ) “I put aside an hour every day to go over that monologue again and again for months, and every time I got to the end of it, I would crack up.”
• “No, but way before that, I’ve been doing little dances in movies for years. Yeah, that was an amazing chance. You know, at my age to be able to do a music dance video, very unusual.”
• “No, improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you’re doing.”
• ”Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.”
• ”One thing that’s happened to me is I’ve been around a long time and I’ve played a lot of villains and so forth. I think it had to do with, well one thing is that I looked younger than I was for a long time. Now I think I’m suddenly starting to play people’s father.”
• “The best thing for me is, when I’m not working, is to be at home and to have a script or two scripts is better, and to be just walking around the house and just thinking about the lines.”
• “The minute I start to talk about acting, I realize that I can’t. You know, it’s an abstract thing, a little bit mysterious even if you do it for a living.”
• “When I was a kid I joined the circus. I did that. It is true. But it’s not like you think. There was a guy, he had his own circus. His name was Carol Jacobs and he owned it. It was a small thing.”
• ”When videotape came so a lot of movies that I do have a kind of afterlife in video. Things where movies that I do would come and go; they still come and go but you can go rent them and see them on TV.”
• “Yeah, well I’ve always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre and that’s really where my training is. As an actor, that’s my training.”
• “Because if I don’t know my lines, I really don’t know what I’m doing.”
• “I don’t need to be made to look evil. I can do that on my own.”
• “You know … acting is not very difficult, once you know how to do it, … And that’s … so beautiful, because you can say that about anything: It’s not difficult, once you know how.”
• “I tend to play mostly villains and twisted people. Unsavory guys. I think it’s my face, the way I look.”
• “I was a little kid, 10 or 12, … I remember exactly … transistor radios had just happened. When transistor radios happened, that was huge. And everybody had this little thing. And I was on a bus — I had been to the skating rink in Flushing [Queens, New York], near where I lived. And we were on the bus, and some kid had a transistor radio and it came over the radio. When ‘Giant’ came out, he was already gone. Yeah, that was a very big deal.”
• “And I remember sitting in my car, listening to that night … when Kennedy and Khrushchev were facing off and it was very scary.”
• “It was a wonderful movie. Very popular. Many people saw it. Oscar.”
• “Morning is the best time to see movies.”
• “I make a lot of movies. I make four, um, five, six movies a year. I do it because I really like to work. I really don’t have anything else to do. Some of them go straight to video. They’re so obscure. I make movies that nobody will see. I’ve made a number of movies that I have never seen.”
• “I remember once, years ago, I was walking out a door — I’d been having a conversation and I was walking out the door, and this guy said to me, “Chris,” and I stopped and I turned, and he said, “Be careful.” And I never forgot that. And it comes back to me often: Be careful. That was good advice.”
  
• “That’s supposed to be a fact, that the question mark is originally from an Egyptian hieroglyph that signified a cat walking away. You know, it’s the tail. And that symbol meant — well, whatever it is when they’re ignoring you.”
• “When I was a kid, there was someone in my family, an adult, and whenever I saw them, they would say, “You got a lotta nerve.” From the time I was a little kid, it was always like, “Heh, heh, heh — you got a lotta nerve.” I always thought, What does that mean? But then when I got older, I thought that it was an instruction. If you tell a kid something, it sticks. I think I do have a lot of nerve. But, I mean, I think I maybe got it from that person who said it to me.”
• “My father was a lesson. He had his own bakery, and it was closed one day a week, but he would go anyway. He did it because he really loved his bakery. It wasn’t a job.”
• “I used to love Danish. My father used to make a Boston cream pie. You never see that anymore. Very good.”
• “Most of the jobs I get are basically very unwholesome people. There’s always something wrong with the guy, and sometimes something deeply wrong. I’m tired of that. I tell my agent I want a Fred MacMurray part. I want a part where I have a wife and kids and a dog and a house, and my kids say to me, “What do you think I should do, Dad?” and I say, “Be careful.”
• “I always figured that if I’m gonna be playing these people, that there should be this relationship to the audience that is very clear. “That’s Chris, and look at Chris having a good time, wanting to take over the world and sink California and shoot everybody in the room” — just so long as they understand that that’s Chris on the set having fun. And that Chris wouldn’t really do anything like that.”
• “Golf. My God, that’s a mysterious occupation. I know people who are — good friends — who are absolutely smitten, practicing their swing and talking about it. I can understand some sort of sport where your body got a benefit, like marathon running or bicycle racing. That’s not golf. And not only that, but the whole business of standing in the sun — my God. That’s like torture.”
• “I love spaghetti. And I like to cook spaghetti. And I used to eat it every day. I weighed thirty pounds more than I do now. You can’t — you can’t do that. Ice cream — I love to watch television and eat ice cream. But that’s like a ten-year-old. I can’t do that anymore. Beer. Beer, spaghetti, ice cream.”
• “Professional dancers don’t go dancing.”
• “When you’re onstage and you know you’re bombing, that’s very, very scary. Because you know you gotta keep going — you’re bombing, but you can’t stop. And you know that half an hour from now, you’re still gonna be bombing. It takes a thick skin.”
• “I had an agent when I first got into the movies who said to me, “You’re gonna be in Los Angeles now once in a while. If somebody invites you to a party, don’t go. Stay in your room, go to the movies.” And I have a feeling I know sort of what he meant: Don’t show your face around too much. Let ‘em be a little glad to see you.”
• “It all happened when I did The Deer Hunter. Suddenly — I’d already been in show business for thirty years, and nothing much had happened. I mean, I really was laboring in obscurity, and then suddenly this movie. It was kind of infectious, and I really did become rather social. Gregarious. And that lasted, I don’t know, ten years.”
• “Movie scripts are usually pretty loose — things usually change a lot. But not with Quentin. His scripts are absolutely huge. All dialogue. It’s all written down. You just learn the lines. It’s more like a play.”
• “Sometimes I look at this watch and I think, There’s some guy that puts these little screws in there? There is something about it. I’m not into cars, either, but there is something about a really magnificent car.”
• “Me and Dennis [Hopper], when we were doing that scene in True Romance, it was hilarious. It really was — including shooting him. All that laughing was real. He was killing me. And all the guys around us — that was a very cracking-up day.
• “I like to listen to radio interviews. I got a list of things that if I wasn’t so lazy, I would do something a”bout, but the idea of having a radio show — two people talking on the radio is fascinating. I’ll bet you there’s some college around here — they all have radio stations. I get now that I don’t like to go anywhere, so if there was some place down the road — twenty minutes’ drive.”
• “I don’t like zoos. Awful.”
• “They say that the human smile is in fact one of those primordial things — that in fact it’s a showing of teeth, that it’s a warning. That when we smile, in a primeval way it has to do with fear.”
• “There’s something dangerous about what’s funny. Jarring and disconcerting. There is a connection between funny and scary.”