Quotes from Dean Jones

I wish I could say I had this master plan for a career, but I always thought acting was something I'd just do until I had a hit record.

My bag is acting or getting into an amusing situation and then sharing my amusement.

I want to be a man who serves my family, a man who increases justice in my community. I want to be all of those things, and yet it is just below the surface that I want to strangle somebody when they cut in front of me on the freeway.

Sometimes being a survivor is the greatest compliment you can get in Hollywood.

The great privilege it has been to work with some of the most talented people on the face of the earth. My first scene in a movie was with James Cagney, for goodness sakes. There I was, just out of the U.S. Navy without an acting lesson to my name.

A family film is a very particular and explicit form. Family films typically include adult principles that are moral, but they should be as intelligent, funny, and intriguing as any other film.

You don't get a script sent to you for two years, it crosses your mind, 'Gee, what's going on?' Then five years pass, and pretty soon a decade has gone by. Finally, you say to yourself, 'Well, if in fact that's it, then let me be happy with 30 pictures that made about $460 million and pictures that made a lot of people laugh.'

If you want a job, do what I did: work for other people for 50 years; but the odds of you getting swallowed up by the blasphemous godless, decadent, deadly spirit of today's show business are thousands to one.

I have made 34 pictures, 10 of them for Disney, and none of them for Disney were really bad characters. So I think that recently I have kind of begun to hide behind certain actor's devices in order to make a dividing line between what I used to do and the characters I have been asked to do today.

After 50 years in the motion picture business, I'm still learning my trade. This recent shoot of 'Mandie and the Secret Tunnel' was a revelation. The two young directors, Joy Chapman and Owen Smith, represent a group of actors, directors, and cinematographers all over the country that never show up in New York or Hollywood.

'Mandie and the Secret Tunnel' - the book and now the movie - pits a very young woman against forces she cannot control and events she cannot possibly know about. She's in way over her head, and you're pulling for her from the opening scene.

I think, if I had a big flop, that probably it would have ended the string at Disney, but it didn't! Every film was a success.

It's a good thing we don't know when we start out that when we arrive we haven't gone anyplace. What's wrong with success? Kelly asked, exasperated. You just walked out on the biggest hit show on Broadway, something you'd always wanted. Why did you leave? Because, Kelly, I said slowly, nothing, but nothing is half as good as you expect it to be.

I could remember a half-dozen incidents in which I'd come much closer to death, but I could never recall any past moronic stunt that filled me so completely with disgust.