Top 100 Christopher Walken Quotes
#1. I grew up in the '50s, in New York City, where television was born. There were 90 live shows every week, and they used a lot of kids. There were schools just for these kids. There was a whole world that doesn't exist anymore.
Christopher Walken
#2. I have made a number of movies that I have never seen. It's not a matter of ego. It's a matter of being disappointed. It's really a shame. It's just as difficult to make a movie that no one cares about as to make a hit.
Christopher Walken
#3. To me, there are things you're good at and things you're not so good at. For some reason, I'm good at darker characters. It has to do with how you look.
Christopher Walken
#4. I tend to play mostly villains and twisted people. Unsavory guys. I think it's my face, the way I look.
Christopher Walken
#5. An actor really is a kind of intermediary between an audience and the piece, whether it's a play or movie.
Christopher Walken
#6. The thing about cooking is it's so interesting to watch. I don't know why, but if you go to somebody's house and they're making something, they usually say interesting things while they're cooking.
Christopher Walken
#8. Usually in the first performances I'm completely panicked. And I pull myself together. By the time you get to the end of the play, you really start to have fun.
Christopher Walken
#9. Emotional power is maybe the most valuable thing that an actor can have.
Christopher Walken
#10. It's impossible for me to play a part without thinking about the audience.
Christopher Walken
#11. I'm better off not socializing. I make a better impression if I'm not around.
Christopher Walken
#13. 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.
Christopher Walken
#14. Well, I was sort of a jack-of-all-trades in show business for a long time. I was a singer and a dancer and then I got a job as an actor.
Christopher Walken
#15. I'm scared of everything. I think it's only sensible to be that way.
Christopher Walken
#18. 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.
Christopher Walken
#19. In the end, there's still the Word, everywhere ... In Heaven and it's Angels, the Earth and Stars, even in the darkest part of the Human Soul It was there where it burned brightest. And for a moment, I was blinded ...
Christopher Walken
#20. There are movies that I've made where I thought I was going to be good, but when it was cut it together it wasn't. And there are a lot of movies that, for one reason or another, just don't become popular. So to me it's always been a little bit of a roll of the dice. That's the way it goes.
Christopher Walken
#23. I became an actor by accident. I suppose I figured since I was in musical comedy from the time I was a teenager, I suppose I figured that I'd always been in that world to some extent.
Christopher Walken
#25. I became very critical of zoos and circuses and keeping animals in captivity. I wish it was against the law.
Christopher Walken
#26. Older actors, and women in particular, are getting more opportunities. It pleases me, its very good news for us. They say that people are living longer, and maybe it's just that there's more of us out there.
Christopher Walken
#27. 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.
Christopher Walken
#28. As an actor, I'm rather hit and miss; I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't.
Christopher Walken
#29. 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.
Christopher Walken
#30. An audience is the most dangerous thing in the world, because they paid, and they're looking at you. And they paid! And there's a lot of them! And they cast a cold eye, because they paid. To be on the stage, you have to be very secure.
Christopher Walken
#31. 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.
Christopher Walken
#32. I've made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you're in a movie and you think, 'I wish more people saw that' - because you're good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that's show business.
Christopher Walken
#33. 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.
Christopher Walken
#34. In the theater you rehearse for a minimum of five to six weeks. And then you get to play it. Which means you get to get better. That's the great thing about the theater.
Christopher Walken
#35. Onstage I have a natural chutzpa that audiences like. I'm out there.
Christopher Walken
#36. My life is really quite conservative. I've been married nearly 50 years. I don't have hobbies or children. I don't much care to travel. I've never had a big social life. I really just stay home, except when I go to work.
Christopher Walken
#37. In the theater you rehearse in order to do the performance. And in the movies the rehearsal and the performance are kind of the same thing. You're figuring it out and hopefully the camera is pointed at you when you're doing it.
Christopher Walken
#38. Some people can do things and get away with it. Comics are famously like that. Why is it that some guys can say the most horrible things and it's not offensive, it's funny?
Christopher Walken
#39. I remember from when I use to be a dancer, there is an expression among dancers, I had a T-shirt that said: SHUT UP AND DANCE.
Christopher Walken
#40. In England, and all over Europe, and all over the world, actors act until they die. They get old, really old, and they're still working. They just keep doing it.
Christopher Walken
#41. No, improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing.
Christopher Walken
#42. I come from a show-business family, so wanting to become an actor never crossed my mind. It was just a part of my life.
Christopher Walken
#43. 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.
Christopher Walken
#44. As an actor you become that lighting rod between the person who made the play and the audience.
Christopher Walken
#45. You know, there's nothing you can do about your public image. It is what it is. I just try to do things honestly. I guess honesty is what you would call subjective: if you feel good about what you're doing, yourself, if you figure you're doing the right thing.
Christopher Walken
#46. 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 t be. I didn't want to be a doctor. I wanted to be in show business.
Christopher Walken
#48. My background is in musical comedy. I didn't know I was going to be an actor. But all my points of reference have to do with musical comedy and in being kind of a showoff.
Christopher Walken
#49. There are certain directors where you know you're going to be good or you're not going to be there. There are people where you kind of know that if you miss the mark then it'll probably not be in the movie and that's very reassuring.
Christopher Walken
#50. I'm not sure I'd write a good cookbook, but I might make a good cooking show.
Christopher Walken
#51. I have a lot of trouble with scripts. I have a lot of trouble imagining things while I'm reading them.
Christopher Walken
#52. I don't usually get to play fathers or grandfathers or uncles. Now that I'm older, maybe I can play people closer to myself. I'd like that.
Christopher Walken
#53. Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.
Christopher Walken
#55. I don't play lovers. I wish I did. At least once I'd like to have a crack at one of those guys. A heartbreaker. Some people are born to it. I'm not.
Christopher Walken
#56. I make movies that nobody will see. I've made movies that even I have never seen.
Christopher Walken
#57. One of the difficult things about being an actor is to stick around.
Christopher Walken
#58. There are people who are able to plan their career, their future, but I've never had any talent for that. I just do things and hope for the best. Say yes, take a chance, and sometimes it's terrific and sometimes it's not.
Christopher Walken
#59. I don't think I'd be a good director because people would ask me, you know, "What is it? What's going on here? Where should I put the camera?" Or, "What's my motivation?" And I would say, "Do whatever you want!"
Christopher Walken
#60. 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.
Christopher Walken
#61. You hear about things happening to people - they slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other way - and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something; you don't want to die in some unnecessary way.
Christopher Walken
#62. 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.
Christopher Walken
#63. I have a friend of mine who does me on his answering machine, and when I call him, I answer. It's pretty strange.
Christopher Walken
#64. I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy - or, I don't tend to get those parts. I've tended to play eccentrics. I've played a lot of villains, of course.
Christopher Walken
#65. By the time I was 7, I did walk-ons, catalogue modeling, you name it. In the Queens where I grew up, you didn't go bowling on Saturday; you went to dancing school.
Christopher Walken
#66. I've done a lot of things I cringe when I watch and some things I'm proud of ... Movies are strange. You have to be a little bit lucky with them.
Christopher Walken
#67. Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. That's a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising.
Christopher Walken
#69. I've been married for 46 years, and I live in a nice house, my grass is always cut, I pay my bills, and my cat loves me!
Christopher Walken
#70. Because if I don't know my lines, I really don't know what I'm doing.
Christopher Walken
#72. I used to love Danish. My father used to make a Boston cream pie. You never see that anymore.
Christopher Walken
#73. Growing up in New York is like living in a horror museum because there are so many strange people walking the streets and riding the subways. You learn to develop a tough front if you live here, just in case you get into any kind of trouble and you need to talk your way out of it.
Christopher Walken
#74. There's something dangerous about what's funny. Jarring and disconcerting. There is a connection between funny and scary.
Christopher Walken
#75. It's interesting - a lot of good actors are good mimes. But I'm terrible. If I tried to do an impression, nobody would know what I was doing.
Christopher Walken
#76. It's what actors call a big, juicy part, when you're a leading man. I don't get a lot of those. I get a lot of supporting things.
Christopher Walken
#77. I'll tell you, Quentin Tarantino really writes the most amazing dialogue.
Christopher Walken
#78. My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I look for things in different places, sometimes things happen.
Christopher Walken
#79. There's an impression that actors make a lot of choices. I just take what's there.
Christopher Walken
#80. Too many young actors are strutting about and doing films without having developed some of the depth you need to bring off certain kinds of roles. I think that's the problem with the system, where a lot of younger actors who haven't had a chance to develop suddenly become stars.
Christopher Walken
#81. My favorite characters are the ones that are the most successful movies.
Christopher Walken
#82. If you play a king, it's better if everybody treats you like a king.
Christopher Walken
#84. I've made one or two movies that I haven't even seen, because they were never released. I have made things that I never even saw. But I will always go see the movie I'm in.
Christopher Walken
#86. You do something on television, and so many people see it that it follows you around. It's interesting. I've done a couple of things on TV, and probably more people saw me than in all the movies I've made.
Christopher Walken
#87. I like cats a lot. I've always liked cats. They're great company. When they eat, they always leave a little bit at the bottom of the bowl. A dog will polish the bowl, but a cat always leaves a little bit. It's like an offering.
Christopher Walken
#88. I'm an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.
Christopher Walken
#89. I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.
Christopher Walken
#92. I used to be prettier than I am, but I think I look better now. I was a pretty boy. Particularly in my early movies. I don't like looking at them so much. There's a sort of pretty thing about me.
Christopher Walken
#93. A man can be an artist ... in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasey's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece.
Christopher Walken
#94. I play disturbed people a lot, but always with a bit of distance or tongue-in-cheek. Most of the villains I play are essentially harmless.
Christopher Walken
#95. 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.
Christopher Walken
#96. Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew. It's a rhythm thing - people who speak English where they have to hesitate and think of the right word. And I think it rubbed off.
Christopher Walken
#97. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. I never know how successful a movie is going to be - when you make a movie you're always hoping for the best.
Christopher Walken
#99. 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.
Christopher Walken
#100. I don't like flying at the best of times. And as I get older, I like it less and less. I don't much like driving, either. I prefer to be driven. And, when I'm in London, I don't even like walking on the street. I can never get used to looking the right way when I cross the street.
Christopher Walken
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