Kevin Spacey

People don't tend to hassle me because when I've got a hat on, I look like a banker. I'm just a plain guy.

What I like about Britain is that I can live a normal life here.

Exposure to the arts and culture is enormously valuable.

It's always the big question in our lives if you have a lot of success. What do you do with it? Buy more houses, buy more cars, buy more stuff, be wealthy and distant and unengaged? Or do you take all that good fortune that has come towards you and spread the love, do something with it?

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.

Kids aren't growing up with a sense of television as the aspirational place for their ideas.

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.

I've never done a movie that's shot more than 40 days because I just don't do those kinds of films.

While the sciences are hugely important, let us not leave behind a child's imagination.

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.

I never wanted to go to the Old Vic and not have it survive long after I was gone. It's not about me; it's about that theater. And the more that it's able to grow and do everything it should do without me, then I've done my job.

Partisan rancour and party politics and ideology have got in the way of compromise - and compromise is the only thing that has ever made politics successful.

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.

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.

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.

[Washington, DC] feels like you're watching performance art. A lot of the time. I don't believe them, I don't believe what they say, I don't think they're being absolutely sincere. I think it's performance art. And most of them are bad actors.

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!

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.

Clarence Darrow was a unique and courageous man. Several of my favourite actors have played Darrow... Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy.

I would love to do much more singing; it's just one of those things where I can't quite describe what it feels like when you're standing in front of a forty piece orchestra, and there's nothing between you and an audience but a microphone. It's like strapping yourself to a locomotive, and I love it.

If you're lucky enough to do well, it's your responsibility to send the elevator back down.

I feel it's a responsibility for anyone who breaks through a certain ceiling... to send the elevator back down and give others a helpful lift.

Maybe there are people who are gamers who haven't seen movies I have made, or the movies I have made have made no impression on them at all.

I think people love it when anybody acts bad; it's not particular to me.

It's a really wonderful thing to focus your life on something other than your own personal career and ambition.

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.

There are good people in the lobbying industry. Lobbyists can serve a very useful purpose.

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.

After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley.

Essentially, your voice is an instrument; it's a muscle, and you have to treat it like a muscle, and so you have to work it.

Life's all about perceptions.

People say, 'If you open a movie online at the same time as in movie theatres, no one is going to go to the movies.' That's just not true. People love to go out and have a shared experience; they always will.

What hasn't surprised me is that audiences, as we found starting with box sets, want control, to decide how they watch it. Appointment viewing is slowly being put slightly behind.

As long as we, in the United States, continue to insist that our politicians have to spend all of their time raising millions of dollars for television ads, it will be corrupt. If we leave it up to the politicians to clean up lobbying and finance reform, nothing is going to change.

I'm lucky if I find one movie a year that's worth doing, and when I do find one, it usually only takes 20-30 days to shoot.

I certainly identify with the role of mentor and, to some degree, maybe teacher. I do a lot of work with kids at the Old Vic.

If you wanna compete, you've got to get into the original content game.

When you study, as I did, every theatrical beginning in this country, none of them have been greeted well. The Royal Shakespeare Company was a disaster, Peter Hall was a disaster, Richard Eyre was a disaster, Trevor Nunn was always a disaster.

You have to always be ready, always be alive, and always be willing to move in a new direction.

What I've certainly learned is that whenever I've said anything about real politics, I've come under attack. So it's best simply to play politics on television.

For kids growing up now, there's no difference watching 'Avatar' on an iPad or watching YouTube on TV or watching 'Game of Thrones' on their computer. It's all content. It's just story.

There are a lot of people out there who offer roles to actors because they'll elevate their movie to a place the movie would never reach.

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

Whether that's positive or not, people are talking about the Old Vic Theater again with passion and commitment and controversy and debate.

When I look around at Broadway and the West End, theatre is becoming an exclusive club.

There does seem to be in the U.S. now an ideology and an entrenchment that has stopped people doing what they are hired to do, which is govern rather than run for office the whole time.

There are times when you do a play when you are living in the character over a two-and-a-half-hour period or longer, and you come to the end of the night, and you can feel like you were hit by a truck.

The audience wants control. They want freedom.

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

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

For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.

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

I love doing impressions.

If there is one thing I object to, it's actors talking about how tough their jobs are.

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

For me, coming to work every day has turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be.

No one should ever feel sorry for me. I've been treated very well for the most part.

Fundamentally, I like to accomplish things.

If you're not concerned about maintaining an image, you can pursue roads that another actor might not take.

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

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.

I'm supposed to convince you, for two hours, that I'm somebody else. Now if you know everything about my life, if you think you've got me figured out and you think you know all my dark secrets, how am I ever going to convince you that I'm somebody else?

Secondarily, I think films that are driven by music also terrify studios.

No one's personal life is in the public interest. It's gossip, bottom line. End of story.

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.

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

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

I couldn't imagine something asking as much of me as 'House Of Cards.' It's a great warm-up for coming back to the screen.

The fact is that HBO is doing the kind of films and the kind of stories that the movie industry used to do. You look at a lot of the specialty sections of studios that have gone under... and there's no doubt in my mind why filmmakers and screenwriters and actors are ending up at a place like HBO. They do it better than anybody.

At the end of the day, people have to respect people's differences. I am different than some people would like me to be.

But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.

Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.

Bobby Darin was one of the first to take black musicians on the road with his band, and there were places that didn't want him to play, and he stood up to it.

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

Over a spell of about three years, I played a series of roles that were, for me, all very different, but most of them came out within a six-month period. They all dealt with a kind of dark territory that in some cases had been mined before in movies.

I'm attracted to things that are challenging and fun and interesting, and it certainly seems that audiences enjoy them as well.

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

Why not sit around a Beverly Hills pool collecting residual cheques? That is not the kind of life I want.

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

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.

Games are advancing in terms of storytelling and trying to create a character, and it's a brand new audience for me.

I liked it because it was such a dangerous script and showed just what human beings are capable of. Here was a movie in which Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, who always win in every movie they ever do, simply don't win. I felt that was outrageous for a commercial movie.

London is a very energising place to be.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I was on a couple of scholarships. I had a job in the school administrative office. I had a job as a hat-check boy in a restaurant. I had another job as an assistant to a casting director. It took a lot to get myself enough money to put myself through Juilliard.

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

I have never played a game in my life.

Am I now supposed to go on Oprah and cry and tell you my deepest, darkest secrets because you want to know?

I'm not a writer, and I don't want there to be any mistake about that.

One of the tasks that any artistic director has is, you're trying to bring elements together that will work. The truth is that you could bring all the best talents in the world together and produce a big turkey.

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.

The more shows that are produced, the more writers are hired, producers are hired, actors are hired, directors are hired, it means the more people will get employed. It's better for the economy. It's a fantastic thing.

If you go out eight times and play tennis eight times this week, yeah, it's the same rules, but it's a different game every time you're out on that court. You're working on a different part of your game every time you're out on that court; your partner's working on a different part of their game, and the act of being watched changes it.

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

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

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