Alec Baldwin

Acting in the theatre is fun; acting in film is work.

Being able to stay home with my children is what I prefer.

My brothers were funny, and there was a lot of shtick and comedy and nastiness and violence and fighting and sports.

Everything I hated about L.A. I'm beginning to crave. L.A. is a place where you live behind a gate, you get in a car, your interaction with the public is minimal. I used to hate that.

Am I a homophobe? Look, I work in show business. I am awash in gay people, as colleagues and as friends.

I've had a relatively charmed life. I loved to be out in the city. New York was my town. I've had people come up to me and say, 'You're a great New Yorker. You've given your time and money to so many New York charities. You're a great supporter of the arts. I like some of your movies - and some of your movies suck, actually.'

My father would chaperone at high-school dances, and the toughest guy in the high school used to want to fight my father. My father broke his hand on a guy's head once in school.

My children are the only thing in my life that makes me happy.

Hollywood does draw some very strange characters, and then the power of Hollywood and what they can do with it becomes like a blood sport to them.

You have a lot of optimism when you are young.

Everybody had posters in their room; everybody had the four symbols of Zeppelin on the wall and all that.

I'm a pretty loyal person.

I had a marriage that I came to in the same way everybody else comes to a marriage. We all take chances when we get married.

I think I'm just like a lot of people who had nothing. We had to amuse ourselves, so we had to become amusing.

I never thought of myself as a wealthy person. I've thought of myself as a person who has had a lot of luck. I don't have the same stress that other people have, but there are too many things I could have done differently if wealth was what I was after. If I was all about money, I would have lived in L.A.

I think Jerry Lee is sad. As a musician, he was far more talented than Elvis Presley. Everybody down in Memphis knows that. Elvis became a movie star because he was beautiful. Not that Elvis wasn't talented, but Jerry Lee Lewis was incomprehensibly talented as a musician.

On a television show, precise acting isn't the order of the day.

I wanted to work with Cate Blanchett. She is one of the five greatest movie actresses of her generation.

Manhattan is like Beverly Hills. And the soul of New York has moved to Brooklyn, where everything new and exciting seems to be.

There are people who would rather choke than go see my movies. They write me letters all the time.

To be in this business and have tremendous integrity and only make distinguished choices is very tough.

I won every award you could win in television. I got paid well. And people loved '30 Rock'. And I loved '30 Rock'. I mean, sometimes you do a show that's a hit show, and you hate it.

I think about how much I used to work and how much I used to make that the priority.

The way we divorce in this country hurts people on the deepest level. The ripple effect and resonance of it is remarkable, vast - vast - and if I ever went into Parliament, I would become very involved in that.

You have actors who begin at a certain young age and there's very little change in their technique and the depth of their performances; they're the same 30 years later.

I have dear friends of mine who represent real Republicans. Goldwater Republicans. Strong on defense. Tough on immigration. Fiscal conservatives.

My whole life is classical now. Except my wife. I don't have a classical wife. I have a classy wife, but I don't have a classical wife.

Grown-ups yell. I don't know why, but they do.

I don't hate Trump, but he's not somebody I admire.

I need to be home more. That's the goal now. I have a steady flow of things people want me to do.

I remember during my lifetime I would meet women, and it was almost like God would say to me, 'Now, this woman here is not the one you are going to end up with, but she is going to be a lot like this woman; look at this woman, study this woman.' And when my wife showed up, He was like, 'You recognize her now?'

I just love Rome. It really does cast a spell on you.

If I won the lottery tomorrow, I probably would never work again.

My life, in some ways, has been a half-measure. I didn't commit myself all the way to my marriage and family, because I would have given up more. And I didn't go all the way with just being completely selfish. I always wonder where my career would be if I was more selfish.

My wife is the greatest person I have ever known. She is just a living doll; she is great person and a great mom. We have a girl and a boy, and we are going to have another boy.

I have always wanted to do a show where I could stay home. When you make movies, you might as well take a dart and throw it at a map.

Nobody cares about your autograph. There are cameras everywhere, and there are media outlets for them to 'file their story'.

I don't think acting is addictive. If I stopped acting tomorrow, I really wouldn't care. If you told me that I would have to sell real estate in New York City to look after my family, that would be fine with me.

Bush wasn't elected, he was selected - selected by five judges up in Washington who voted along party lines.

If MSNBC went off the air tomorrow, what difference would it make? If the 'Huffington Post' went out of business tomorrow, what difference would it make?

I collect travel alarm clocks. I was in a flea market in France once, in 1994, and I opened up this beautiful Jaeger-LeCoultre folding eight-day winding clock folded into a beautiful case, and I went, 'Wow, man.' And I've been collecting travel alarm clocks since 1994.

Everybody I've ever worked with - 99.9 percent of the time, I've had a successful or very agreeable experience with.

The wealthy don't have any sense of humor. It's not like the English, where the theater is perhaps the one place where they have a sense of humor about themselves.

There's less critical thinking going on in this country on a Main Street level - forget about the media - than ever before. We've never needed people to think more critically than now, and they've taken a big nap.

All actors have a significant amount of vanity about work, and necessarily so. Things they will do and won't do, and I've completely lost all of that. I don't care.

I went to Jimmy Gandolfini's funeral, and when I was there, I realized Jimmy Gandolfini didn't have Twitter.

Let's face facts, this is visual medium, there's a very high premium put on people who are good-looking. But the minute you rely on that you get yourself in trouble. You certainly don't make a career out of that anymore as an actor.

I want my weekends back so I can be with my kids.

I know women that act queeny, I know men that are straight that act queeny, and I know gay men that act queeny... To me, those are people who think the rules don't apply to them.

If you're going to have someone defend you, it doesn't get any better than Kristen Stewart.

Soaps are the best. They really are. If you can do a soap, well, you can do anything. You have to learn pages of dialogue very quickly.

The campaign finance scandal in America is the global warming of American political life - with cash substituting for deadly solar radiation.

I wish I could play the lead role in one movie, one great movie.

Everything I do is about my kids and wife and how we can all be together.

I'm the kind of person who does not want to be anywhere that I'm not wanted.

Everything that Bush touches turns to manure in public policy.

Often in films, you have no idea where you're going to be six months from now. And I grew very weary of that. And television, although it wasn't necessarily as creatively diverse as filmmaking can be, it was the lifestyle choice that I needed to make.

Doing these parts is not fun. It's challenging, but no fun. It's creepy. I would rather play the guy that throws the touchdown pass and gets carried off the field.

Have I thought about having more kids? Oh sure, that would be great; that would be heaven. That would be fantastic.

I think Rachel Maddow is quite good at what she does. I also think she's a phony who doesn't have the same passion for the truth off-camera that she seems to have on the air.

I think my exact comment was that if Bush won it would be a good time to leave the United States. I'm not necessarily going to leave the United States.

When I told my parents, 'I'm going to be an actor,' they screamed and wept and freaked out.

As a lifelong Democrat, I never thought I'd lead an effort to defend the symbol of the Republican Party. But when I saw the cruelty that Ringling inflicts on elephants every day across the country, I had to speak up.

I'm doing 'Rock of Ages' one day, making out with Russell Brand. Soon after that, I'm advocating with Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Cynthia Nixon for marriage equality.

When you're with someone, you want everything to be great. And that's the pressure that you put on, and what you just can't do.

There's almost no popular music I listen to now. I'll hear it because it's everywhere... Music is ubiquitous now.

There's a way I could have done things differently. I know that. If I offended anyone along the way, I do apologize.

I haven't changed, but public life has. It used to be you'd go into a restaurant, and the owner would say, 'Do you mind if I take a picture of you and put it on my wall?' Sweet and simple. Now, everyone has a camera in their pocket.

The Trump name is now going to mean something else.

Success begets success. I've been offered a lot of movies now that '30 Rock' has been successful.

I consider myself a pretty good conversationalist, but you wind up being downgraded to idiot status when you don't speak the language!

New York... where people come for their Ph.D. in corruption.

I turned popular music on the radio, and I never listened to it again after that, in about 1985. That's when I switched over to classical music, and I pretty much stayed with that since then.

I think I'm just like a lot of people who had nothing.

I don't think I really have a talent for movie acting.

Manhattan is like Beverly Hills. And the soul of New York has moved to Brooklyn where everything new and exciting seems to be.

We need more participation, so when I see someone like Trump, I go, 'You know something? Good for him'. I may not support him, but let him run.

I don't need to be married to Georgia O'Keeffe or Lillian Hellman, but I like being with a woman I can look up to.

Hollywood studios bury that stuff - actors who punch directors in the face and try to run producers over with cars - insanity, criminal behavior. But the studios are invested in that star, they can't have that person's name dirtied up.

As my friend said to me, when you have children, typically in a second marriage, when you're older and you get married again to a woman who would have children, you must always remember that you make sure the children attend a college where the commencement ceremonies are held in a facility with a wheelchair accessible ramp.

I loathe and despise the media in a way I did not think possible.

There are shows that are monolithic successes on TV that nobody in the business ever watches one episode of.

I know there's an impression that I'm someone who seeks to have violent confrontations with people. I don't. Do I regret screaming at some guy who practically clipped my kid in the head with the lens of a camera? Yeah, I probably do, because it's only caused me problems.

It's good-bye to public life in the way that you try to communicate with an audience playfully, like we're friends, beyond the work you are actually paid for.

I'd rather live my life off screen and give only a certain amount of energy to the work.

I did not have a happy family life a few years ago. I was divorced, and I was very alienated from my daughter, and I was out there cutting every ribbon and running around New York hosting events for different causes to supplant my loss because I didn't have a family to go home to. Now I don't want to be Mr. Show Business anymore.

I'm not interested in offending anyone. If homosexuality was an issue for me, I would have moved out of New York years ago. I find that laughable.

I feel I'm two people: I have my interest in acting and I have a lot of other political interests I'd like to pursue.

A lot of people want to not wear a tie when they go to a restaurant. They feel they don't have to wear a tie. I think it's kind of a statement they're making. I don't know what that statement is. I haven't quite figured that out yet.

When you lack a certain vitality in the film business, there's no hiding it. It's like you've had your limb chopped off. How do you hide the fact that you're missing an arm?

Down with Dukes of Hazzard!

Getting older is hard.

John McTiernan, the director, is not Ingmar Bergman. He does action-adventure movies.

There's three things: there's masculinity, there's intelligence, there's sensitivity. You've got to bring those three things to a leading man's role: masculinity, sensitivity, intelligence. In some people, there's a little too much in the mix of one or the other.

In the theater, you act more of the time. In the movies, you get to act maybe 20 or 30 minutes of the day. I love acting in movies. It's just different.

'The Apprentice' was a huge success, and Trump was a huge television star who managed to trick people into thinking he was the guy from the show.

When I get onstage in a play, I feel very safe, very protected, very fulfilled.

I have my older daughter Ireland and my wife Hilaria, and I have Carmen and Rafael.

When I'm not working, I dress like a surfer. I look like I'm going to come into your house and clean your pool.

I don't try to communicate with my 'audience'. I don't bother with that any more. I used to try to have conversations with people, but it's futile.