Top 100 Walken's Quotes
#1. It's funny - Frankie Valli's story and that advice that he was just getting from, you know, Christopher Walken's character, is very true for someone who's in a creative field.
John Lloyd Young
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The minute I start to talk about acting, I realize that I can't. You know, it's an abstract thing, a little bit mysterious even if you do it for a living.
Christopher Walken
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. It's okay. You don't have to worry about anything. That's because I'm here.
Ryohgo Narita
#8. Christopher Walken was probably the most experienced dancing partner I've had in movies, because he has the same background as I do. He's from theatre, Broadway and off-Broadway, and we both shared that.
John Travolta
#9. It's something that people relate to - and I hope my kid doesn't relate to - but there's a level of believability in playing complex characters. You know, Christopher Walken has done some hilarious comedies, De Niro. There's great room for complexity and darkness to do well in comedies.
Jeremy Sisto
#10. No, well, my father's definitely not Christopher Walken.
Josh Lucas
#11. I don't have a lot of hobbies. I don't play golf. I don't have any children. Things that occupy people's time. I just try to take jobs.
Christopher Walken
#12. 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
#13. When I'm on the road making a movie in another city, on my day off, I always go to the movies. I love going to the movies. You get a ticket and sit there, and it's very interesting to be around people who aren't personally invested in you, in any way. They're just going to the movies
Christopher Walken
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. I like to stand in my kitchen with the script on a counter that's about chest high. Usually I do something else at the same time - make a chicken or slice vegetables - and all day long I just read it over and over and over.
Christopher Walken
#18. I always like to watch comics and it's interesting that you can tell if someone's funny in 10 seconds.
Christopher Walken
#19. 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
#20. The top has no limits. We can keep on climbing. That's what people do. No
That's what I do.
Ryohgo Narita
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I'm a character actor. I have to find work in good movies where I can make something of my role. I'm a very lucky guy to be in that kind of position. It's like a kid who dreams of becoming a baseball player and then he gets to play for the Yankees ...
Christopher Walken
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Also for me it was different because I play a lot of villains and in this one I play a dad and I play a good guy, basically. He's the Secretary of the Treasury. I never had a job like that.
Christopher Walken
#28. I wasn't a trained actor, I was trained in musical comedy theater, and when you do that, the audience is completely part of the thing. It's like Elizabethan theater. You play the scene, and then you turn - the audience is part of it.
Christopher Walken
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. I live sort of in the country and I like that. It's very quiet, it's beautiful.
Christopher Walken
#36. I think the fact that I was raised in show business, in New York City, in the '50s, that's affected my personality to the point that I'm a little different.
Christopher Walken
#37. I was born in America but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe. Many people in my neighborhood hardly bothered to learn English.
Christopher Walken
#39. If you play a king, it's better if everybody treats you like a king.
Christopher Walken
#40. I'm a better actor now than I ever was, I wish I could have hurried that up, but there's no way. Anyway, I always wanted to be around for a long time. Like a European actor, I hope I live a long time and that I'm acting until I finish.
Christopher Walken
#41. I've been to Chicago a lot - it's one of my favorite places. My wife is from Chicago, and I worked in the theater there a lot.
Christopher Walken
#42. 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
#43. There's an impression that actors make a lot of choices. I just take what's there.
Christopher Walken
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. There's something dangerous about what's funny. Jarring and disconcerting. There is a connection between funny and scary.
Christopher Walken
#47. In rehearsal you have a good accident that you can repeat.In the movies if you have a good accident you hope the camera's running.
Christopher Walken
#48. Acting has to do with saying it as if you meant it, so for me the words are always very important. It's very important for me to know my lines, know them so well that I don't have to think about them.
Christopher Walken
#49. 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
#50. And I think that when I play these villains, maybe what is different is that the audience sees me play these and they know that that's Chris and he's having fun and he knows that and he knows that and you know that and everybody knows that.
Christopher Walken
#51. It's not necessarily how many minutes you're on screen, it's the material you have. It's more important what it is you have to do than the amount of time you're there.
Christopher Walken
#52. I think that weddings have probably been crashed since the beginning of time. Cavemen crashed them. You go to meet girls. It makes sense.
Christopher Walken
#53. I'm scared of everything. I think it's only sensible to be that way.
Christopher Walken
#54. Early on, I played one or two disturbed people, and I guess I must have been good at it, because it stuck. But, you know, I'm a regular guy. I stay home a lot, I make an effort to keep a distance from the whole social thing, the openings, the parties. I try to live in a calm way.
Christopher Walken
#55. Hmm? It's sort of a hunch ... I just knew when I saw your eyes ... I can't come up with cool words to describe it. Well. To put it simply ... '
After deliberating, he finally said the words that are likely to come from the wizards in a fairy-tale.
'I can do anything.
Ryohgo Narita
#57. I've always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre, and that's really where my training is.
Christopher Walken
#58. 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
#59. I come from a part of New York that was almost entirely immigrants. I was born in America, but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe.
Christopher Walken
#60. 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
#61. Also, I think there are huge reactions sometimes, which are also mysterious.
Christopher Walken
#63. I'm better off not socializing. I make a better impression if I'm not around.
Christopher Walken
#64. It's impossible for me to play a part without thinking about the audience.
Christopher Walken
#65. People think that my favorite roles to do are villains, but I find comedy to be the most challenging and rewarding.
Christopher Walken
#66. Emotional power is maybe the most valuable thing that an actor can have.
Christopher Walken
#67. 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
#69. 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
#70. When I was a kid, I worked in the circus. It was a touring circus that was owned by a man named Terrell Jacobs. It was just one big tent, and he was a lion tamer. He didn't have any kids, but the bit was that I would dress up as his son in an identical outfit.
Christopher Walken
#71. An actor really is a kind of intermediary between an audience and the piece, whether it's a play or movie.
Christopher Walken
#72. I tend to play mostly villains and twisted people. Unsavory guys. I think it's my face, the way I look.
Christopher Walken
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#77. You never forget how to dance. It's just a matter of your bones working and things like that.
Christopher Walken
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. I think all men when they get older, they look at the mirror and they probably see their father a little bit.
Christopher Walken
#81. I've been very fortunate, because I've been involved in things that very often lead to obscurity. I was in some pictures that were not successful whatsoever. I think people admire persistence. People notice that I'm still there.
Christopher Walken
#83. 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
#84. I think a lot of theater actors that were great, like Walken or Glenn Close, later became film actors.
Sam Rockwell
#87. I never know when I am being funny, and the other way too. I don't think you can think about that. I don't think you can try to be funny. Some people are just funny.
Christopher Walken
#88. I think that if I had grown up and had been in show business and the movies twenty five, thirty years earlier, I think I would have made a lot more musical movies.
Christopher Walken
#89. I don't have kids. Maybe that's kept me young. I have a wife for almost 50 years and she looks after me a little bit like I was seven years-old.
Christopher Walken
#90. When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It's hard to keep going when you don't get any better.
Christopher Walken
#91. 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
#92. I like to go to work, and also, I don't have any kids. I don't have any hobbies. I don't like to travel. So going to work is kind of it.
Christopher Walken
#93. I have always refused to do something that has offended me. I have been offered potential roles that are totally vulgar.
Christopher Walken
#94. 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
#95. 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
#99. I actually really like Christopher Walken. I find him a really interesting actor. He's such a character that I love everything he's in.
David Lambert
#100. Usually directors hire me because I'm what they are looking for. But once in a while, and it's very rare, they will hire me and then try to make me over.
Christopher Walken
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