Quotes from Oscar Isaac

'Drive' is a genre piece, and a lot of times we don't get really sophisticated genre films.

I've been fortunate to be working mostly right out of school. Every year, there was a little something, and it kept the confidence going. It's about confidence and the belief.

The motivation is important for me to act it, but I don't necessarily want the audience to know my motivation.

In the 1960s, there was a forward way of speaking and inflection.

When I'm creating a character, I don't see it so much as playing someone else as just playing a specific part of myself under certain circumstances.

I always joked with my parents. I told them, 'If I don't make it as an actor, my fallback is musician.'

Humans are mutants, everything's a mutant - things that evolve.

The self-made man that some people believe is a myth? It could be, because you do it on the backs of other people.

How do you play 'righteous'? Do you just kind of stand up straighter? What does that mean as an actor? You don't really play a quality.

I've done movies I'm very proud of, but there's always a sense of: 'Come see this shiny new car!' The question I hate the most is: 'Why should people see it?'

Advice? Look at your pay statements.

The better I am at observing moments in life, the better I'll be at showing them in my acting.

There's nothing scarier than unlimited choices.

The songs I've written that are the strongest, I'm like: 'I don't know where that came from. It just kind of popped out.' You feel you can't take a whole lot of credit for it. I didn't purposefully will it into existence.

I actually started playing in little cafes around New York, and I have a lot of good friends of mine who are musicians who are struggling in New York.

'Cool' is detached and emotionally cool. My instinct is to battle anything that seems overly cool.

Our morality is based on so many factors: of where we were born, who we were born to, what values were instilled in us, what values we chose, the way that our lives have shaped us. That dictates so much of what we assume is our morality, and also the culture, all of these things.

What's funny in 'The Mayor of MacDougal Street' is how Dave Van Ronk talks a lot about the time and how exciting it was and how electric it was.

With Shakespeare, there's no subtext; you're speaking exactly what you're thinking constantly.

I have been playing acoustic music for a very long time, and it's something that I am very comfortable doing, so if I made a record, it would probably be a mixture of that and some other things that I'm interested in.

You can't try to be authentic. You either are or you aren't.

Every frame of a Coen brothers movie is filled with history and meaning, and the deeper you go, the deeper you get. That's why their movies stand up particularly well to repeated viewing and investigation.

I think Shakespeare really got it. He was the first one to introduce psychology to villains and give them a real point of view.

The hardest things to do in any art is to risk failure and put yourself out on the line.