Quotes from Mark Ruffalo

I have mental illness in my family. I have a lot of compassion for those people.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

If I'm working in the city, then as soon as I'm home, I try to lock in on my son for a few hours. Every day. I see how important it is that he's starting to come into my world now. It's just an effort to give him that male mode of being.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I normally don't have that much confidence. I usually am trying to talk to directors out of giving me a job.

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

When I left my Catholic school, I was around 10 or 11 years old, and it started to unravel for me there. Kids pick up on things if you're interested and inquisitive. I was seeing things that were not in line with what I'd been taught about Jesus. It didn't jive with me.

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.

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

All of us have got to pay into a certain system, and what we're saying is it's 100% American that every American should be able to create, store and sell their own energy as they see fit. Let's decentralize energy. Let's democratize energy.

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

I'm very nervous in the beginning and then I get in there and start doing my work and I feel more comfortable.

There is nothing a good long walk can't help work out.

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.

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.

Every piece of geopolitical strife that's happening in the world today is revolved around energy, either trying to grab resources or people using resources to fund radical groups.