Top 100 James Franco Quotes
#1. The man is angry, the man
Is destructive, the man wants more.
The woman is more, the woman is all.
James Franco
#2. I'm an actor, I do movies, and I need to find somebody who enjoys that kind of stuff. It's not like, "Oh, I have my work time, and we go on a date, and it better be darn fun and exciting!" I think it should all coalesce a bit more.
James Franco
#3. You are successful if you are able to work on the kind of material that you want to - if your life conforms to your dreams, regardless of outside acceptance or acclaim.
James Franco
#4. Make your characters interested in something. Striving for something. In need of something. Good at something. This will make them likeable and interesting.
James Franco
#5. I feel there are so many things in this world that have been and are being created that I could spend the rest of my life thinking about, and I couldn't cover all the things I'm interested in. That to me is what makes life sweet-learning and exploring.
James Franco
#6. Not having any real direction, one writer would lead me to another.
James Franco
#7. I used to read a lot about myself and the projects I was doing. When I was only acting, I wouldn't read any reviews because I didn't find them to be very helpful.
James Franco
#8. School allowed me to have outlets so that some of the pressure was taken off the acting. Every role in every movie, I used to live or die by. Once I had these new outlets, I relaxed a lot more.
James Franco
#9. I guess in some people's lives, no one tells you what to be, and so you be nothing.
James Franco
#10. When I was a child, I wanted to be an actor, but I had really bad buckteeth. I didn't want to get braces, but my mom said I couldn't be an actor if I didn't get the braces. So, I got the braces.
James Franco
#11. If many people love me, then I must be important.
James Franco
#12. I worked the drive-through at McDonald's and tried out different accents - Italian, Russian, Irish.
James Franco
#13. I get like six or so hours of sleep a night.
James Franco
#14. Most of the books that I've adapted I'm doing because I love the book and I feel like it's a great work of art in itself, and when it's a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.
James Franco
#15. Directing, editing, and everything about filmmaking has definitely changed me as an actor.
James Franco
#16. Funny how new facts pop up and make you doubt that there's any goodness in life. Everyone pretends to be normal and be your friend, but underneath, everyone is living some other life you don't know about ...
James Franco
#17. Gay James: Well, why don't you stop playing games and give us a little of your private self?
Straight James: Kind of impossible, don't you think? As soon as I share it, it becomes public.
James Franco
#18. It's basically the best job in the world. If you're fortunate enough - and I consider myself fortunate - you get to work with your friends and you get to work on projects that interest you.
James Franco
#19. Read Frank's poem, "Advice to the Players." It talks about all of this, about the human need to create.
James Franco
#20. I might have to stumble a little bit more in public than others, but that's fine, I don't mind, I've developed a thick skin.
James Franco
#21. Quite Franc-ly, I think I am an asset to this world we live in. I know that if I didn't exist, there would be some truly upset people just waiting for me. A life without Franco is like a kitten without fur. That's what my reflection told me.
James Franco
#22. I become kind of obsessive about research.
James Franco
#23. The wind came in languid gusts like whispered reminders.
James Franco
#24. Sometimes I think to myself, what should James Franco say next? And then it comes to me. Boobs.
James Franco
#25. Did you ever see Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke? That's what happens if you really smoke weed and make a movie. You get two guys and no plot and it's basically like, 'Yeah! Let's drive a van made of weed!' And that's pretty much the movie.
James Franco
#26. I don't need a vacation in the traditional sense, like I would if I had a job I hated.
James Franco
#27. A director on a film really sets the tone of how people go about things, so everybody is happy to be at work and everybody does their best.
James Franco
#28. I don't cast somebody that I think is like my younger self.
James Franco
#29. If you just read the book, you're taking in the narrative, you're taking in the characters, you're understanding it in a certain way. If you make a movie it's really an act of translation.
James Franco
#30. I teach a lot - I teach at the UCLA and USC graduate film programs - and a lot of those projects are my students' projects that I act in or I do a cameo.
James Franco
#31. I am not going to be the guy who's not pulling his weight.
James Franco
#32. I don't even like to sleep - I feel as if there's too much to do.
James Franco
#33. I drank from the bottle again and it was a scary plunge because I always wanted to take too much. It hurt, but it was also impressive, like being in the hands of a bigger force. And because of that, a relief.
James Franco
#34. Teens today rule the world. The whole culture - movies, music - is pointed at young people. They have so 'much' power.
James Franco
#35. When I was a young actor, I just didn't understand how to function in this business as an artist. It is a business, it's called the film business for a reason, there's money involved. But on the flip side, nowadays I do not let the business side of it rule either. It's a balance.
James Franco
#36. If the work is good, what does it matter? I'm doing it because I love it. Why not do as many things I love as I can? As long as the work is good.
James Franco
#37. The general view is that actors start on soaps and then maybe graduate to prime-time television or film; normally you don't see a film actor going to do a soap.
James Franco
#38. I love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.
James Franco
#39. If I'm working on a film, I'll do sit-ups for before I shoot. Like, 100 in the morning or something.
James Franco
#40. I'm starting to teach now: I teach in the graduate film program at NYU and next year I'm going to be teaching at Los Angeles at the film program and English program at UCLA.
James Franco
#41. When I was younger, I didn't know that I should just listen to my own voice, my own artistic sense of things when I was choosing projects, because one of the biggest creative decisions that an actor can make in the film business is what you will work on.
James Franco
#42. If this is the only life, then why I'm not just doing everything I want to do.
James Franco
#43. I learned a lot of good things in my school. I've audited a lot of other schools, and I guess after a while I got a little tired of the acting school atmosphere.
James Franco
#44. There's so much pressure put on relationships to deliver the satisfaction of life. And to me, that is just not the answer. I feel like it should be something in addition to what you love or be a part of that.
James Franco
#45. Sometimes I get a little sad, and I feel like being alone. Then I talk to my cat about it, and he reminds me I'm James Franco. Then we dance.
James Franco
#47. You work really hard to make it, and maybe you get some acclaim, but then you realize there are certain limitations as an actor.
James Franco
#48. I have high aspirations. I want to be an architect.
James Franco
#49. The new critique you're gonna start hearing about James Franco, is 'He's spreading himself too thin.'
James Franco
#50. I don't go on vacation. I don't really need vacation.
James Franco
#51. In the end, I do have a group of friends and teachers whose opinions I respect, and so I guess I just have to be content with their feedback.
James Franco
#52. Barry had done it with her, the girl I loved, and it had meant nothing to him; Tanya would die and no one would care; and there were billions of bodies alive on earth and they would all be buried and ground into dirt; and Picasso was a master at age sixteen and I was a perfect shit.
James Franco
#53. All I know is that when I needed McDonald's , McDonald's was there for me.
James Franco
#54. All is good. Don't worry, the pain will help you. You'll get into some trouble, but it will work out in the end.
James Franco
#55. As an actor in the classroom, you're revealing so much, and teachers are, you know, they're just critiquing like a painting or a piece of work; it's like, it's you, and it's your emotions that they're working with.
James Franco
#56. Showing the addiction and unusual sexual practices are ways of just outlining a much bigger character trait.
James Franco
#57. I feel like because I've done more gay characters, gay scenes, or gay projects than most straight actors, people see it as some sort of mission. It's more of a case-by-case basis, and just trying to capture figures that I love. I guess that a lot of the figures that I love were gay.
James Franco
#58. Create your world around your work. Create your work around your life. Let other people help you shape it.
James Franco
#59. I still work really hard, but I like to think I'm a little smarter about at least the type of movie I'm getting into.
James Franco
#60. You want to be interesting? Be interested.
James Franco
#61. I start movies with people that I believe in and people with visions, you know, that I believe in. And so if it doesn't kind of come together in the right way, at least I was doing it because I believed in the person and the movie.
James Franco
#62. There's a large chunk of me in all the parts. As an actor, I got involved largely because I want to let things out. The best acting is that that is most real and the only way to do that, is to genuinely feel it.
James Franco
#63. I worked at a McDonald's drive-through. I could always tell when girls were interested: They'd drive around again and say, 'I forgot something.'
James Franco
#64. "The Wolfpack" is a real life clash of life and fiction and the saving power of brotherhood and make-believe.
James Franco
#65. I was a black center in the middle of all the nature. I was nothing, but I could do anything.
James Franco
#66. I was an English major at UCLA when I was 18, and then I left after a year to start acting. I was educating myself during that time.
James Franco
#67. When I went to film school about three years ago, the first two years you're required to make a series of short films. I started making films based on short poems.
James Franco
#68. We tell specific stories about ourselves to ourselves and we're all the heroes of our own lives. But you live through certain experiences with other people, and sometimes they have very different takes on what happened.
James Franco
#69. They're just peanut butter and jealous! Haters gonna hate, and ain't-ers gonna ain't.
James Franco
#70. There's a tendency, when you're directing yourself, not to give the performance as much care, because you feel like there's too much focus on yourself, or that all these people are just standing around setting everything up, waiting for you.
James Franco
#72. You just don't really rehearse kissing scenes, whether it's male or female.
James Franco
#73. Acting is an art form and you want to take roles that are challenged and it's more of a challenge I think to play dark characters. Not that I want to always play those, but it is a challenge and challenges are rewarding and fun.
James Franco
#74. I don't consider weed to be any worse than having a beer.
James Franco
#75. Fight scenes are really more like dances than they are fights, because you're depending on your partner to do the right move at the right time. Yes, a tough person or somebody who knows what they're doing will look better in a fight scene, but it also has a lot to do with the other person.
James Franco
#76. Japanese moe relationships socially dysfunctional men develop deep attachments to body pillows with women painted on them.
James Franco
#77. I'm a huge Cormac McCarthy fan and have read every book of his.
James Franco
#78. Always have one artistic thing that is pure, at least one thing, where you don't compromise. You can do other things to make money, but have one pure area.
James Franco
#79. My name is James Edward Franco. Ted is a nickname for Edward. That's what my parents called me. I also got 'Teddy Ruxpin' a lot. It just got to a point where I got sick of it, so when a teacher called out 'James Franco' my junior year of high school, I didn't correct her.
James Franco
#80. If you have a profession that depends on what you look like, you can't blame somebody for caring about that. It's part of their job. So it's vanity but it's also not in a lot of cases. It's being professional.
James Franco
#81. When I sign on for a project, I'm there to give the director all the material he or she might need to tell their story, and that's the number one priority.
James Franco
#82. It feels really sad, to me, to go to a dark bedroom. It's like surrendering to the night or something.
James Franco
#83. I love collaboration of all kinds, and I love the way that collaboration pulls me into directions I wouldn't go in if I was working on my own.
James Franco
#84. Adapting a book is essentially a collaboration, whether the author is alive or dead.
James Franco
#85. When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write.
James Franco
#87. You don't really prepare for a kissing scene.
James Franco
#88. I've come to a point where I just want to do movies that I just believe in. I have come to an understanding of filmmaking, a new understanding where I believe it's a director's medium. That means working with people that I believe in.
James Franco
#89. This was the way the night had cashed in. Choices had been made and things happened, and here we were. It was sad, and funny. My life was made of this. Stuff like this.
James Franco
#90. I loved the world of Oz. I guess as a young man, I was just drawn to fantasy worlds. I liked being transported to alternative realms where a lot of my early imagination was sparked.
James Franco
#91. Reviews about film acting are very ... tricky, because movies are such a collaborative thing.
James Franco
#92. Almost all the movies I've directed are adaptations. And I think what I found when I went to film school, where they try to push you to find your voice or your thing, is that I got a lot of things out of adaptations.
James Franco
#93. I went to NYU graduate film school and met Pam [Romanowsky], and after doing a few things with her I thought she had the right sensibility and that she could figure it [The Adderall Diaries] out.
James Franco
#94. The selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, 'Hello, this is me.'
James Franco
#95. There's this phenomenon where people do like to announce movies that they think I'm doing that I'm not.
James Franco
#96. I actually don't smoke weed, but I've played a lot of stoners - especially with Seth Rogen.
James Franco
#97. I was kind of scared of failing at acting.
James Franco
#100. Sometimes rabbits, like, turn me on. I don't know why.
James Franco
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