Phrases

01. I trained more than anybody ever in a golf film ever made – my swing is pretty hot.

02. Any time you’re a type, your career’s over.

03. As an actor, the minute you start getting real in interviews, you lose mystery.

04. I’m not an Adonis, that’s for damn sure. I’ve never really thought of myself that way, and it doesn’t matter to me. My favorite actors aren’t Adonises. Dustin Hoffman is a flawed-looking man; he’s amazing to me. Tom Hanks is flawed-looking; people love him. Same with Gene Hackman.

05. I’ve been in fights, but that doesn’t make me cool or like a tough guy or more interesting actor, I’m not proud of it.

06. If I have enough money to eat I’m good.

07. When the ship is sinking and you’re forced to choose sides, the new solution is to jump from island to island to island. You don’t have to pick.

08. Sometimes perception is almost more important than the skill level of an actor. And if you give too much away, you have nothing to take for yourself and put onscreen. If people feel like they know you too well, they won’t be able to indentify with the character you’re trying to portray. Or they’ll feel that you’re just playing yourself, and then you just become a personality actor. And that’s the death of any actor.

09. There is no grand strategy. My sensibilities push me in a certain direction. Other actors have different sensibilities. That’s all. I think it really is that simple. There’s no grand strategy. There are so many variables that I have no control over. I sign on to movies I want to watch, as a fan.

10. If people perceive you as a good actor then they’ll wish for you to be a good actor and they’ll root for you when they watch you, but if you come out and you’re going to clubs every night people don’t root for you anymore.

11. The big thing for actors is the level of commitment. So, if you know something’s already happened, there’s not a whole lot of whys and hows that go down. You just innately commit ’cause it happened. It does help with commitment.

12. I think I’m prone to not being a good guy in relationships.

13. My mom is at my house every day, and she nags me about everything, especially hygiene.

14. We did this two-week boot camp before we filmed the movie. I got to know everybody in the group and we became friends. We got really tight throughout those two weeks.

15. No, I was an unknown when I walked in that room. He didn’t know who I was from a fly on the wall.

16. Have you ever noticed how most critics disagree with the public? That should tell you a lot about critics.

17. Have you ever noticed how most critics disagree with the public? That should tell you a lot about critics.

18. I didn’t jump onto anyone else’s coattail and ride their wave.

19. To be able to sit in Donald Trump’s apartment and talk about the future of corporate real estate was amazing.

20. Clubs are so lame. Nobody even dances at these clubs. They stand around and get drunk and they schmooze. There is no enjoyment factor.

21. People were going to geometry class and I was swimming through vats of chili on ‘Even Stevens.’ It was like a dream!

22. People were going to geometry class and I was swimming through vats of chili on ‘Even Stevens.’ It was like a dream!

23. I’m just selfish. I have to be for what I do.

24. I think there’s a form of honesty, because I used to be very honest with the press, and then it backfired on me, and I understood it.

25. I go to sleep at night, and I feel like I just dreamed the whole day.

26. You can prepare all you want, but if you never roll the dice you’ll never be successful.

27. I became a Christian man in a very real way. I could have just said the prayers that were on the page, but it was a real thing that really saved me. And you can’t identify unless you’re really going through it. It’s a full-blown exchange of heart, a surrender of control.

28. I’ve never been able to learn from other people’s mistakes – I’m not that smart – so I usually learn by trial by fire.

29. I am trying to impress myself. I have yet to do it.

30. Adversity has a way of introducing a man to himself.

31. I love doing stuff that I haven’t done before. That’s the goal: To keep reinventing myself.

32. I think penguins are the most human of all the birds, which may be why people love them. They’re cute, they stand upright and they look like they’re wearing tuxedos.

33. Probably the sexiest woman I know is my mother.

34. I’m constantly jumping off cliffs and developing my wings on the way down. … It’s a gamble, a … spiritual gamble. You are who you choose to be.

35. Sometimes I feel I’m living a meaningless life, and I get frightened.

36. It’s good filmmaking when you don’t have to say anything and you can still tell the story.

37. To be an actor, a true actor, you have to be brokenhearted.

38. Copying isn’t particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.

39. I got kicked out of every school I ever went to.

40. I think envy motivates a lot of people.

41. You can’t buy back your respect; you can’t buy back your career. You only get one, so I don’t want to mess that up.

42. I have a hard time with free time.

43. If you can mix Hilary Duff and Gary Oldman into the same actor, that’s my goal. I know it’s strange to think about, but that’s the goal.

44. I turned down a scholarship to Yale. The problem with college is that there’s a tendency to mistake preparation for productivity. You can prepare all you want, but if you never roll the dice you’ll never be successful.

45. I don’t have to live this lavish lifestyle.

46. All of the things that have happened in my life have been self-propelled. I can’t blame anybody else or point a finger at anybody.

47. I like the dark, mysterious, maybe even gothic type girls. They have to have a good personality too! I’m very picky!

48. Now my dad is with me, traveling with me and a big part of this whole thing is I like to mix it up a little bit, you know. Who gets to take their father on a private jet across the country and stay in first class hotels? So we’re enjoying it, but I’d stop if it’s not possible.

49. Talent is to actors what luck is to card players. Its not really anything; its just a fictitious word that people have created and labeled things. Talent is like, you know, I never really believed in talent, I believed in drive and determination and preparation, but talent is sort of like luck.

50. Oh yeah, I’m the president of the lucky club. There are so many talented people who don’t work. And the crop of young actors I’m surrounded by is incredible. When you have people like that around you it amps you up a little bit. Also, Emile Hirsch and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, or guys like Ryan Gosling. It’s a really good crowd and I feel I’m coming up at a good time. But equally, there’s a lot of good young actors who don’t get to work who are more talented than I. I’m just lucky.

51. I just wish the crowd I was associated with was more passionate about what they were doing and less consumed with the commerce of the art form.

52. I’ve learned to be more reserved, watch what I’m saying; I got in a little bit of trouble. People tell me ‘Never lose that, never lose that,’ but then I get in trouble so I have to lose it. I’m trying to keep a little bit; I’m never going to lose who I am, I just gotta tone it down a little bit.

53. The big thing for actors is the level of commitment.

54. I want my audience to know me for my work, not because of who I’m dating or what drugs I’m on or what club I went to.

55. But this is a little different. This is the adult acting. This is a different crowd. It’s more work and more good work. That’s it. People will have their opinion regardless.

56. It’s really easy to fall for someone on-set, but in the end you know, it’s a representative and it’s not really them.

57. There’s beauty in people who reinvent themselves. Actors live a thousand lives, as do hackers … the personality can play around forever.

58. Never wanted to do anything else than acting ever in my life. But I’m 20, and there’s so many possibilities. It would be insane for me to say, “Yeah this is definitely it, I’m never doing anything else.” I’m 20 years old. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know anything about life. So I don’t know. I may be a train conductor in 10 years. I have no idea. And that’s the joy of this all.

59. Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin.

60. When you’re working with the best of the best, I’m not gonna put that on hold so I can work with people who studied the best of the best.

61. To my mind, talent doesn’t really exist. Talent is like a card player’s luck. It is motivation, ambition, and luck. It’s just a drive to be the best. I think acting is a con game.

62. I’m not a strikingly handsome guy, but I’m in movies.

63. You never really meet a human being until you live with them or know them for awhile, so this is my clown and they understand that and so these interviews don’t bother them.

64. My life is okay, my life is pretty good.

65. My neighborhood was rough, but I live a great life now. I don’t fight that much now. I don’t look for it anyway, but if someone hits your mother, whether you’re a star, an accountant, or an astronaut or anything… I mean it’s your mother, so I lost my mind.

66. By studying psychology i want to be a better actor. There’s something about studying body language and non-spoken emotion – I know the innate response. But to really study it like a science would be fun.

67. I got to grow up in a situation where drugs were demonic. To watch your dad go through heroin withdrawal is something that would keep you from doing any of that yourself.

68. If I had more recreation time I would be able to step back and reflect on how life has changed. But it has been like a constant… boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!

69. When a gust of wind hits a broken bone, you feel it.

70. I’m an individual, and I have opinions.

71. And I’m not a personality; otherwise I’d be coming out with an album, performing on MTV. All that stuff is possible and I can do that tomorrow. I just have no need.

72. A relationship to me is never about the romance.

73. My family’s lineage is five generations of artists who never made it.

74. What’s cool is when you’re able to give your audience imagination and you don’t have to cage them in like animals.

75. I hated golf when we first started, but a big part of the training process was falling in love with this sport, so I went on tour with the UCLA Team.

76. I got accepted at Yale but never went.

77. If you’re trying to learn how to act from a class, you’re analyzing the teachers’ movements and their intricacies, and it becomes like a pantomime of you wanting to be them, and that’s wrong. Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin. It’s your own imagination, and your own version of it.

78. I’d love to go to school and have a normal life, but I don’t see any professor at Yale being able to teach me more than Steven Spielberg.

79. I was planning on going to Yale to theater school.

80. I used to dirt bike a lot. I can’t do that anymore. Can’t eat a whole lot of chocolate anymore, either. I can’t be in ‘Indiana Jones’ and be a fatso!

81. I’m a little territorial and defensive.

82. People think that their vote counts. They go to college, and everything gets mixed up. People stop caring, … They raise the gas prices, but what the Everyman makes and welfare never seem to keep up. The HMO system is so ridiculous. I’m slightly educated. No one wants to hear what Hilary Duff thinks of the economy.

83. I’m a video game fan, and I always thought it would be cool to be able to control a character.

84. My generation will actually be the first generation that is tamer than the one that came before it, and it will probably be poorer; less fun and less money. It’s ridiculous. In my parents’ generation, rebellion was pop culture. It’s not anymore.
Shia LaBeouf

85. If you asked an 18-year-old what they want to do with their life, and the options are ‘Transformers’ or Lars von Trier, he’s probably shipping out for ‘Transformers.’ If you ask a 26-year-old what he wants to do, ‘Transformers’ or Lars von Trier, he’d probably pick Lars von Trier. So, my sensibilities are changing as I change.

86. I think, my generation, it’s hard to have hope when you got a $700-trillion derivatives debt to pay and a bubble about to explode and $500 trillion worth of GDP.

87. I drink protein shakes nonstop – three or four a day – and I run a lot, so you get rid of the bad carbs and keep the rest so you have the energy to make it through.

88. There’s a form of selling out. It’s necessary. You have to become edible for people in Texas. You have to become edible for the Christian right, for mass audiences.

89. If I could meet my mother and marry her, I would. I would be with my mother now, if she weren’t my mother, as sick as that sounds.

90. My generation will actually be the first generation that is tamer than the one that came before it, and it will probably be poorer; less fun and less money.

91. My first car, I got it in an auction at my temple. It was an ’86 Volvo that I got for 500 bucks, and then wound up throwing $10,000 into the stereo system and put TVs in the foot rests. It was the most ridiculous Volvo you’d ever seen, but I had never had money before and I was out of my mind.

92. They’re very, uh, you know, I don’t come from the suburbs and a jolly, Disney type of lifestyle. I come from something totally different. And they’re cool and bare minimum so it’s not always a money issue for me.

93. People are still emulating the old fashioned criminal.

94. When you look at golf films before us they’re all – garbage or satire. A lot of sports films tend to vilify the opposition. Where the opposition becomes this big angry monster, so big you can’t beat him.

95. You can’t have bank holding companies acting as hedge funds. You can’t have them taking a million-dollar pension plan for Joe Schmo the bus driver and treat it with the same risk appetite that you treat George Soros’ pocket money. It’s fundamentally ridiculous.

96. The comic book world is a tough business.

97. No, I come for a hippy lifestyle, it’s very open; my parents are both hippies.

98. Well, you don’t make any demands to Steven Spielberg.

99. My mom is the backbone not just of my family but of many families.