Quotes from Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Quality isn't about where the money came from or which company gets to put their name on the thing. What matters is who made the movie and why they made it.

There's no royalty in America, so people deify actors.

Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them.

I would like to do a musical, if I could find a cool one. A song-and-dance role is closer to me personally than other characters I play.

I don't blame folks for not wanting to put me in their movies or whatever. I understand if their audiences had an association with me.

My dad never blew anything up, but he probably had friends who did. He and my mom have always preached that the pen is mightier than a Molotov cocktail.

My mom brought me up to be a feminist. She would always point out to my brother and me that our culture does often portray women like objects...

If you look at all the movies that have made tons of money, almost all of them are great movies. Even Titanic. I think Titanic is a great movie.

This is the saddest, most depressing music I've ever heard. It makes me so happy.

"Music is something that professionals do and not something that I do." That's not natural. Music belongs to everybody.

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

I didn't really like doing commercials.

Supermarket tabloids and celebrity gossip shows are not just innocently shallow entertainment, but a fundamental part of a much larger movement that involves apathy, greed and hierarchy.

There's an absolute prejudice that good movies are dramas and comedies are more dismissable. But I couldn't disagree more.

Press is basically a created story. It's all just stories.

As soon as you are trying to be funny or dramatic, that's when things start feeling fake and boring.

Comedy takes a very specific technique, specific skills.

When I was a teenager I loved acting, but I really just loved it for myself. I didn't like the fact that anyone else saw the work I was doing. When I moved to New York, I started to realize that I wanted people to see the stuff that I was doing, and I wanted it to mean something to them.

Hollywood has the idea that movies have to be dumb. But especially movies for or about teenagers have to be really dumb!

It's a pretty intuitive process, picking the projects that I want to get involved with.

I have a really terrible sense of direction.

Success is not important to me, nor are power or money. If the script feels good, then I'm in. It's that simple.

Real life is not as simple as it is on a screen. I think real life is actually a lot more beautiful.

That's what life is: repetitive routines. It's a matter of finding the balance between deviating from those patterns and knowing when to repeat them.