James Spader Quotes

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James Spader

Profession : Actor

Birth : February 7, 1960

I like to read and listen to music and go for walks and travel and see art. I enjoy cooking and eating and spending time with my family. I don't really find myself searching for things on the television very much.

James Spader

If I don't need the money, I don't work. I'm going to spend time with my family and friends, and I'm going to travel and read and listen to music and try to learn a little bit more about how to be a human being, as opposed to learning how to be somebody else.

James Spader

Acting is easy and fun. You earn a lot of money, and you bang out with girls. The profession is given tremendous significance within our society, but it's not really worthy of it.

James Spader

I'm most drawn to characters who are compelling and repellant at the same time, very often right at the same moment, and who are frightening and funny all at once.

James Spader

When doing theater, you have to find great satisfaction in the small things. There's going to be a repetition and a redundancy night after night, but it's the small variations in those moments - a word, a tone of voice, the smallest sense of enlightenment that can happen in an instant onstage - that will be the most rewarding.

James Spader

The protagonists that I've played tend to be people who make trouble. Or even if they don't make it, they certainly disrupt things. It's fun to do that in life as well. But I don't think I ever played myself.

James Spader

I don't think movies or television have any basis in reality at all. It's all just pretend. That's what's fun about it.

James Spader

Acting for me, is a passion, but it's also a job, and I've always approached it as such. I have a certain manual-laborist view of acting. There's no shame in taking a film because you need some money.

James Spader

I have very, very strong obsessive-compulsive issues. I'm very particular.

James Spader

I think that Barack Obama faces a level of divisiveness, and I don't mean on a national level in terms of the North and the South and the Civil War; I really mean just politically.

James Spader

I lost interest in firearms because we had a dog that was scared to death of the sound of a rifle shot.

James Spader

I played cops and robbers and pirates and all the rest when I was a kid, but I didn't want to grow up and be an actor and play cops and robbers and pirates. I wanted to grow up and be that, be cops and robbers and pirates.

James Spader

The first perk of theater is the girls.

James Spader

I grew up a Red Sox fan. I grew up going to Fenway Park and the Museum of Fine Arts and the Science Museum and Symphony Hall and going to the Common, walking around. My whole family at different times lived and worked in Boston.

James Spader

Sometimes with people their work is the most important thing to them, and sometimes the work enables you to do other things that are more important to you. I probably am closer to that.

James Spader

I've had a lazy career. Sometimes one film a year, sometimes none. I'm walking around in the street and doing this other thing, living, that I'm much more interested in. I just do some acting on the side.

James Spader

Acting is a great way to make a living, especially when I consider what my alternatives were and probably still are. I mean, you are only making movies. It is a lot less pressure than being a surgeon; although it seemed like the only other thing that I was qualified for was manual labour.

James Spader

You know, when you choose to make your living as an actor, it's all fine and good to look at it as some kind of artistic endeavor. At its best, it is that. But the fact is, most of the actors out there don't earn $3 million a picture and can't afford to take two years off between films and look for the right thing. Most of us are tradesmen.

James Spader

I'm not eager at all to present my life out there for public consumption. I like to do one or two films a year and then do what is absolutely obligatory in terms of promoting them. My life outside of films is vital to me.

James Spader

The script is the coloring book that you're given, and your job is to figure out how to color it in. And also when and where to color outside the lines.

James Spader