Mark Ruffalo

I always like having kid energy around. I think it's good for a movie, even when you're doing dramatic stuff.

When you're a young actor, and you're really fighting to have your place in the world - for me, anyway - it took a mental focus and energy and striving. It took a long time. And it was my whole life.

Whatever we want to think about American business - work hard, tell the truth, have morality - it's a myth. There's a lot of graft.

It's been up, down, and sideways for me, man. I could become a huge star, or I could get cancer tomorrow.

I still feel like I'm trying to make it. It's hard to shed the struggling actor thing.

The problem to me is violence. It's not cool to kill somebody or hurt people.

I did a series of these soft-core horror movies called 'Mirror Mirror.' I got killed in 'em all - and each time, I came back as a different character. They were all straight-to-video.

With indies, all they have is their script and it's very important to them. The characters are better drawn, the stories more precise and the experience greater than with studio films where sometimes they fill in the script as they're shooting.

This country consumes more pornography than any other country in the world.

What makes Hulk afraid? It's himself. It's a version of himself that's weak. It's a version of himself that's vulnerable. It's a child inside of him.

With social media, you have this new kind of way to communicate with people that's very immediate, sometimes alarmingly so, sometimes painfully so. If you could just hold some objectivity, a very direct, unfiltered, raw reflection of the way something is landing in the culture without any spin, or filtration, or anything, it's very raw.

A lot of people are living with mental illness around them. Either you love one or you are one.

I didn't apply to any colleges - I lied to all my friends and told them I was going to UCSD, because all their parents would be like, 'Mark, where're you going to college?' and I'd just lie 'cause I felt it was unrealistic to be an actor.

I think of marriage as a garden. You have to tend to it. Respect it, take care of it, feed it. Make sure everyone is getting the right amount of, um, sunlight.

We'll engage in pretty extreme violence in the world but, you know, the one thing that comes to humans as easily as eating or breathing or sleeping, is sex.

If you're not yelling at your kids, then you're not spending enough time with them!

Actors, like it or not, their voices carry deeply into the culture: people look towards them for attitudes, for right or wrong, and today, the mainstream media doesn't really balance the unheard.

The laws of nature tell us there's a finite amount of any substance on the face of the earth, and at some point, that's going to run out. And if we're smart and we have some grace and we have some willingness about our destiny, then we will take ourselves into the renewable world.

My mom was a hairdresser. My aunt was a hairdresser. My brother was a hairdresser. My sisters are hairdressers.

The one great thing about a continuing collaboration is that they know you. And if you're really lucky, they really believe in you and think that your talent has some unending bounds to it.

The true value of somebody in this town is very hard to determine. It's all smoke and mirrors.

Commercials that are geared towards kids. I think they should just, like, wipe them out.

I woke up one morning with the knowledge that I had a brain tumor. It wasn't so much that I dreamt I had a brain tumor; it was like someone just poured the knowledge into my head. It wasn't like an image; it was just like knowing. It was so weird, which is why I paid attention.

The sculptor Frosty Myers and I met when we were bidding against each other at an auction. He's an eccentric, a liberal with a collection of rifles, and his stuff is big art. We share a love of tractors. I'm trading him one for a piece of art.

The fracking chemicals sit in open pits, get trucked around, or sent through pipelines that can burst. What do you think happens when frack chemicals and floods and storm swollen rivers mix?

It's a difficult undertaking. I've been married for four years and I see this movie as a cautionary tale about people who've gone deeply out of communication.

I never used to get photographed and people asking for autographs. I don't mind the autographs, but the paparazzi I find weird. As an actor, you want to be able to regard the world instead of having it regard you.

Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.

After the brain tumor happened, I realized I love acting, I've always loved it, I may never get a chance to do it again.

Certainly, it's very easy to fall in love with cash. If you're going to make all your decisions based on cash, you're going to have a pretty naffy career.

Also, stick around. Don't lose your heart, just keep going, keep at it.

People say funny things all the time during really serious moments in life.

'What Doesn't Kill You' is a really great movie that was little seen but, I think, is one of my personal favorites.

I don't like this idea of Method. I come from that school, but what I was taught was that it's your imagination. You do your homework, and you use your imagination.

And my mother caught wind of this. She never had really tried to guide my career or really had any say in my life as an adult, but this was the one time she said she would never speak to me again if I quit acting.

I like to disappear in the parts I play.

But, the relationships that I see work - As long as they're telling the truth, and saying the things that you don't ever want to have to say to another human being.

Do theater. Because you'll develop a craft that you'll always have. It'll give you a chance to really learn how to act and you won't go into the world with a few measly tricks that will only carry you so far.

I think we've all been kind of... everyone's been hurt, everyone's felt loss, everyone has exultation, everyone has a need to be loved, or to have lost love, so when you play a character, you're pulling out those little threads and turning them up a bit.

For some reason, my whole life has been, 'You can't do this, you can't do that.'

You really can have your dreams and at the same time have a family. But it has to be a really deliberate practice.

I don't have to be a leading man. I can be a character actor. That's really what interests me anyway.

I do readings at the public library. I just did a benefit scene night for my old acting teacher.

I live a bourgeois life.

I'd never taken a job purely for money - I felt that would kill me - but I was afraid that I was heading that way. Then, my brother passing away was the final thing that kicked me over. It reminded me that life is short, and you'd better do what you want while you have a chance.

Yeah, there's a tendency to get pigeonholed in Hollywood.

It seems like they conflate Bruce and the Hulk. It's usually, 'Hulk!' as I'm walking across the street. But sometimes it's 'Banner!' If you go on my Twitter feed, you'll see it's mostly Hulk. I think it was pretty spectacular what we were able to accomplish with CGI with 'The Hulk,' and I can't take full credit for that.

I was probably 8 years old; my mom let me stay up one night. She's like, 'You have to see this movie.' It was 'A Streetcar Named Desire,' and it was on TV, and it was a big deal. And I saw Marlon Brando, and I was like, 'Oh, my God.' That's where it started.

I ran to my marriage, I was happily ready to take on marriage.

But in my heart of hearts, this is the kind of thing... this is what everyone is struggling with in their lives - relationships and family. To me, it's always an interesting area to mine. I'm drawn to it.

They would never let me be a crossing guard when I was a little kid. It would come up, I'd always raise my hand, I would never get picked . They thought I was too wild, but I knew I was responsible enough, if I was given that task.

I remember riding my bike down the boardwalk with nowhere to go and looking at the girls. It was really innocent.

It's imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame.

I enjoyed growing up part of my life in Virginia Beach. We had the ocean and the beach and a beautiful landscape. We were outdoors all the time and we played outside.

My belief about acting in one foot on a banana peel and the other one in the grave.

For the longest time, I was Scott Ruffalo's brother. I mean, he was the mayor of Beverly Hills. He was just so beloved there.

I became an actor so I didn't have to be myself.

I don't like to go to the gym very much if I can help it.

I don't want to feel like I'm stuck doing one-stock performances.

I like to think the movies that I've picked have something worthwhile to say. Something relevant.

I don't know, one out of every two marriages ends up in divorce so there's a lot of great people out there who people aren't happy with.

My personal belief is that you carry your own water in a relationship. If you see a girl and you think she's hot, that's a very human reaction, but you don't go and tell your spouse that, you know? So in one way it's how you behave.

It is a fact that many of the wars and conflicts happening all over the world are aggravated or fought strictly for geopolitical fossil fuel energy interests, and many of the world's most dangerous regimes are funded by fossil fuel dollars.

I was bartending for a long time and going on auditions and was constantly being rebuffed.

I want to do a western. Nobody does westerns anymore.

People use the Method as a shield; it shields them from being vulnerable. I hear all these young actors who are like, 'I'm Method, I'm gonna go live in the house, you know, I totally get it, I've done it, I've been there', but one thing I know is it kills spontaneity.

I was an introverted kid; I liked my time alone. And the rest of my family is pretty extroverted, so I felt like a bit of an oddball. They're very gregarious and charming and charismatic people. I always felt like I was struggling as a young person. I think everyone was very surprised to hear that I wanted to be an actor.

Literally, I think I've quit acting three or four times, only for a few days. Maybe for a few weeks.

Sometimes, as an actor, you're so deeply immersed in a part that you lose control of it. If you're really lucky, a few times in your life it'll take you somewhere you never expected to go. It really blows the top off your understanding of your craft.

I did grow up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, around a lot of my mom's family. I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me, and my sisters and my brother. Probably the most formative part of it was that we grew up on the edge of a forest. It wasn't a big forest, but it was enough. When you're a kid, it feels gigantic.

As we're bombarded with the imagery that we are and now, post 9-11, it's hard not to get hardened by the world and the amount of violence that's allowed to be shown to kids these days.

I love acting with kids, cause they're great acting partners. They're totally present. Even when they're acting, they're still available and you can crack them up or something weird will happen and they'll go with it.

I had to work on a Marlin boat, like gutting fish, like as the bait boy.

I've never Googled myself on the Internet.

We're warriors, this culture, and we're very puritanical about sex and very embracing about violence and I don't know why that is.

When you get to be a 45-year-old man, you start to realize: 'I know who I am, and I know who I'm not. I know my shortcomings, I know my strengths; maybe some of my shortcomings are my strengths.' You start to face yourself as you truly are.

I've just been more interested in doing film right now and I don't want to go away from my family for six months, which was what I would have had to have done if I did the play on Broadway.

I come from a traditional theater background.

My real baby is renewable energy. I feel like whoever starts to crack this nut is going to have a pretty clear shot at the White House. It's a $2 trillion business that America's being left out of.

I didn't really have any interest in producing anything.