Kevin Spacey Quotes

#1. I always thought that, in a way, you want your Superman to be a total unknown.

Kevin Spacey

#2. I'm used to people thinking I'm nuts. And you know what? I kind of love it.

Kevin Spacey

#3. Sometimes it's the crazy people who turn out to be not so crazy.

Kevin Spacey

#4. Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get.

Kevin Spacey

#5. I guess I've been training in the theater for as long as I can remember.

Kevin Spacey

#6. I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.

Kevin Spacey

#7. Sometimes I'll be flipping through the channels and I'll see a movie I'm in. And I'll probably stop and think, 'Sure, I'll watch this.'

Kevin Spacey

#8. My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge, and, at least once a day, retiring to the men's room so I can jerk off while I fantasize about a life that doesn't so closely resemble Hell.

Kevin Spacey

#9. I don't know who Keyser Soze is, but whoever he is, he is going to get gloriously drunk tonight.

Kevin Spacey

#10. I accept the fact that some things don't go the way you hope.

Kevin Spacey

#11. With every job, you should have something to lose, something to gain, something to learn.

Kevin Spacey

#12. I don't play villainy. I wouldn't even know how to play it.

Kevin Spacey

#13. Stay true to your brand and true to your voice and audiences will respond to that authenticity with enthusiasm and passion.

Kevin Spacey

#14. Exposure to the arts and culture is enormously valuable.

Kevin Spacey

#15. I'm aware that, from the outside, this looks like I've got quite an ego.

Kevin Spacey

#16. If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart; if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!

Kevin Spacey

#17. The next day I was in my school's production of All My Sons. This was the performance where I realized something was happening between me and the audience that I hadn't recognized before.

Kevin Spacey

#18. The Old Vic has always been first and foremost an actors' theatre, a home for great talent and memorable performances.

Kevin Spacey

#19. It's the kind of democratization of the Internet that has led to the breaking down of barriers into the creative arts.

Kevin Spacey

#20. What's my favourite book? It changes all the time.

Kevin Spacey

#21. I can imagine there is going to come a time when someone will do 13 hours of a story without breaks.

Kevin Spacey

#22. I believe if you go to a movie theatre, and you see something you think is incredible, if you walk out of the theatre and there was a bin in the lobby of DVDs of the film you just watched, you would buy four of them - one for you and three for your friends.

Kevin Spacey

#23. I suppose the most important thing is to stay interested. It's very easy in life if you get to a place where you're successful to hit the same groove on the record player over and over again because it's safe.

Kevin Spacey

#24. I became a bit of a jerk. A kind of a nasty jerk.

Kevin Spacey

#25. I've been around politics a long time. I've seen it at its best and its worst, been at so many events, listened to private conversations versus public speaking, understood the game of it, and in many ways the theatrics.

Kevin Spacey

#26. It's not easy to sustain a long career, and sometimes I don't even think about how long I've been doing it.

Kevin Spacey

#27. I am different than some people would like me to be. I just don't buy into that the personal can be political.

Kevin Spacey

#28. I've been intrigued by politics my whole life. And, yes, I am very close to the Clintons. I was a Hillary person until I was an Obama person. And she was a Hillary person, too, until she was an Obama one, evidently.

Kevin Spacey

#29. I open myself up every time I walk on screen and give you everything that I am. There are parts of me that are in every movie that I've done. That to me is what my job is.

Kevin Spacey

#30. I think it is just a function of the fact that I moved around so much as a child that I learnt early on to make every place my home.

Kevin Spacey

#31. One can never take the cynicism one comes across in life too seriously.

Kevin Spacey

#32. It's the details and the human element that makes 'Recount' entertaining. Even though we know how the election ends, it plays like a thriller. It's also funny.

Kevin Spacey

#33. The audience, the place you're in, has everything to do with how your performance goes.

Kevin Spacey

#34. President Obama will go down as having passed some of the most historic bills in the history of this country.

Kevin Spacey

#35. Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of 'House of Cards' at once, proved one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge as they've been doing on 'House of Cards' and lots of other shows, we should let them binge.

Kevin Spacey

#36. No matter how good you might be in a movie, you'll never be any better. But in a play, I can be better next Tuesday. That's the thrill of it.

Kevin Spacey

#37. I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.

Kevin Spacey

#38. If you ignore the murdering and the conniving, Francis Underwood is an effective politician.

Kevin Spacey

#39. To look in the eyes of audiences and see the kind of naughty glee that they got with being on the inside, the audience becomes your co-conspirators.

Kevin Spacey

#40. If you look back through history in the United States, there have been very few landslide elections. Half the country always voted for someone else.

Kevin Spacey

#41. Francis Underwood was entirely based on Richard III. When Michael Dobbs wrote 'House of Cards' in the original British series, Richard III is what he based the character on.

Kevin Spacey

#42. Why is 'Game of Thrones' the most pirated show in the history of TV? Because people can't get it fast enough, that's why.

Kevin Spacey

#43. I don't live a lie. You have to understand that people who choose not to discuss their personal lives are not living a lie. That is a presumption that people jump to.

Kevin Spacey

#44. If we don't reach out to make theatre affordable to the young generation, we will lose them all.

Kevin Spacey

#45. I just want to be better. I just want to be better. But this is very encouraging.

Kevin Spacey

#46. My life will change, because I want it to change; and also because this is something I'm committed to doing and that I believe my life has been leading towards.

Kevin Spacey

#47. When you know you have 1,000 people sitting on the edge of their seats in silence because of a shift that just happened on stage, there is no better feeling.

Kevin Spacey

#48. The only real experiences I've had with therapists were the ones who were working with me and my family when my mother was ill.

Kevin Spacey

#49. Fortunately for me, I don't come from the school where you only measure success by how much money something makes or whether it has a big box-office weekend. I measure it by how much people actually participate in the process.

Kevin Spacey

#50. I cotton to the idea that people are much closer to being flawed; they have problems and don't always make the right choices.

Kevin Spacey

#51. Where the gaming world is going - and certainly Activision proved it by hiring me - is being willing to push and bend and move in a new direction of actually capturing the character and storytelling.

Kevin Spacey

#52. Talent is one thing, it is how you nurture and develop it, and never walk away from it. You can be rich, successful, you win awards, but it can always be better.

Kevin Spacey

#53. Audiences grew to like this duality of feeling, where you're both championing a character and you're revolted by them.

Kevin Spacey

#54. I love doing impressions.

Kevin Spacey

#55. I don't categorize characters into one syllable. These are fully-rounded characters that I don't judge; I just play them.

Kevin Spacey

#56. Have we become so celebrity-obsessed that there is no longer a difference between a character and an actor? I hope not.

Kevin Spacey

#57. If I'm sick of me, I can only imagine how other people feel.

Kevin Spacey

#58. I'm not out there trying to get press for myself nor am I trying to convince anybody that I'm living any kind of a life. I'm actually trying to convince people: I don't want you to know what I'm living, because it's none of your business.

Kevin Spacey

#59. You risk working with this director, you risk making this movie, you risk working with another actor you don't know. It makes your heart beat faster. And it keeps you interested.

Kevin Spacey

#60. Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they'll more likely pay for it rather than steal it. Well, some will still steal it, but I think we can take a bite out of piracy.

Kevin Spacey

#61. There's nothing like standing in a place and wanting nothing so much as to change but simply not being able to.

Kevin Spacey

#62. At the end of the day, storytelling is actually very simple in its origin as long as there are people who want to tell stories and there are people who want to hear them.

Kevin Spacey

#63. Storytelling helps us understand each other, translate the issues of our times, and the tools of theater and film can be powerful in helping young people to develop communication/collaboration skills, let alone improving their own confidence.

Kevin Spacey

#64. People have different reasons for the way they live their lives. You cannot put everyone's reasons in the same box.

Kevin Spacey

#65. It's much more interesting when you go to different places - make a left turn when nobody expects you to make a left turn, and make a right when nobody expects you to do that.

Kevin Spacey

#66. It's interesting to play a politician who gets stuff done.

Kevin Spacey

#67. Being an actor sometimes requires that you ask yourself questions you'd rather not know the answers to.

Kevin Spacey

#68. I'm always taken aback by things that are successful that I think are just crap, and then I'm completely surprised when things I do end up being successful because you walk into things and you never know ... It's just really remarkable.

Kevin Spacey

#69. I have always believed that the risk takers are eventually rewarded.

Kevin Spacey

#70. I might have lived in England for the last several years, but I'm still an American citizen and I have not given up my right to privacy.

Kevin Spacey

#71. People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.

Kevin Spacey

#72. I've been on sets where things weren't relaxed because someone was creating tension for no reason.

Kevin Spacey

#73. I think that there was a period of time - and I would reckon it was about 12 years - where I was just determined to see if I could build a career for myself.

Kevin Spacey

#74. Cable TV has become where the best actors, writers and directors have gone to work because they are allowed to do character-driven stories.

Kevin Spacey

#75. I remember meeting the likes of Johnny Carson and Jimmy Stewart for the first time and being completely starstruck.

Kevin Spacey

#76. I'll tell you one thing. I've never heard a director saying that the dailies suck.

Kevin Spacey

#77. I think you need the failures to get the success. You learn more from that.

Kevin Spacey

#78. Anytime someone can beat the acting out of someone else, I think it's a wonderful thing.

Kevin Spacey

#79. People think that direct address was invented by Ferris Bueller, but in fact, it wasn't. It was invented by Shakespeare.

Kevin Spacey

#80. The relationship with the cast has everything to do with how a performance develops, and in a sense that while you're discovering a play in the course of rehearsal with the director, you're also discovering it with your fellow actors. We're all in it together.

Kevin Spacey

#81. It's a great thriller or mystery, but on another level it's a film about the fact that, if you only look at a person through one lens, or only believe what you're told, you can often miss the truth that is staring you in the face.

Kevin Spacey

#82. I write a lot about my experiences and the people I meet. I've got a lot of material. But a book about me? It seems sort of odd.

Kevin Spacey

#83. I terribly miss - we all miss, I think - somebody like the great producer Irving Thalberg. He had a foot in both camps: He understood us creative people. And he understood the money people.

Kevin Spacey

#84. I actually have a number of lovely watches from the International Watch Company.

Kevin Spacey

#85. There are ways in which you can make sure that even if people come to the theatre because they know an actor or actress, by the end, they've forgotten that, and they leave going, 'Wow - what an amazing play.'

Kevin Spacey

#86. You can almost hear people saying, 'We're going to make a movie about an election' and 'We're going to make a movie about a lobbyist.' You can hear the yawning start across the nation.

Kevin Spacey

#87. The greatest sound in the theater is silence.

Kevin Spacey

#88. I'm not going to make general comments about the British press.

Kevin Spacey

#89. If you have done well in whatever business you are in, it is your duty to send the elevator back down and try to help bring up the next generation of undiscovered talent.

Kevin Spacey

#90. Both 'Consenting Adults' and 'Glengarry Glen Ross' revolve around the economic stresses of the '90s. They are about what people do when they're pushed against that wall, and how they're manipulated. They are both morality tales, though in very different genres.

Kevin Spacey

#91. If someone can watch an entire season of a TV series in one day, doesn't that show an incredible attention span?

Kevin Spacey

#92. I find it sad that by not talking about who I sleep with, that makes me mysterious. There was a time when I would have been called a gentleman.

Kevin Spacey

#93. I went through a period of great rebellion within my family, when I was about 9 or 10. I was mad, I had no focus, had no real interest in anything, and so I started to do things that were just rebellious and stupid.

Kevin Spacey

#94. People sometimes have to be reminded, I'm not Frank Underwood. I'm an actor named Kevin Spacey.

Kevin Spacey

#95. You can't win a marathon without putting some bandaids on your nipples!

Kevin Spacey

#96. Living in London has become incredible. I suppose it's easy to love where you live if you love what you're doing. But this is not just a visit: it's my home.

Kevin Spacey

#97. My mother was sarcastic and delightful and, trust me, quite remarkable.

Kevin Spacey

#98. It's not even about being negative. It's just being unsettled, unsatisfied, unfinished.

Kevin Spacey

#99. The legal profession, politics and acting are very closely tied: the whole point is to have an idea and get it across to a listener, whether it is one person or five thousand in a hall.

Kevin Spacey

#100. I want to do better. I want to produce better stories. I want to do better plays.

Kevin Spacey