Quotes from Thomas Jane

I spent a lot of years just learning my craft and falling down in front of the camera.

You want to please society. You want to be happy. You want to be well liked. You want to be held in high esteem and be respected. These are real things. You want respect from your peers, respect from your loved ones; you want to be looked up to for your achievements and your accomplishments. All of this requires conformity in some form or another.

Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the '50s and '60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.

I'm a really huge fan of the old romantic comedies from the '30s and '40s... Huge fan. I love all that stuff.

There's no socially acceptable middle age.

That's the great part about television: It's alive, and it changes and evolves with the way the characters evolve. Stuff that happens to you in your life when you're shooting a TV show, you have to be careful, because it might end up in the show.

I don't like to stick to one formula. That gets boring. I get bored, so I want to try different ways of getting inside something.

I want to make movies that I want to see, and what I miss and I'm not seeing.

I loved 'Boogie Nights.' That was a great movie, and I had a lot of fun doing that.

Harrison Ford - one of my favorite actors - has a wonderful sense of character and depth and uniqueness to him, yet he's able to just deliver the lines without putting any English on it.

My dad was an entrepreneurial businessman, and maybe I got some of his ability.

I spent a lot of years just learning my craft and falling down in front of the camera.

I'm a really huge fan of the old romantic comedies from the '30s and '40s... Huge fan. I love all that stuff.

People lose people, we lose things in our life as we're constantly growing and changing. That's what life is is change, and a lot of that is loss. It's what you gain from that loss that makes life.

I just have a respect for my audience. That seems to be pretty logical.

I still collect comics. I still have a great love and respect for the genre.

Sharing the same vision for what's on the page is always a good idea. The director's job is to establish what that is and make sure that everyone sticks to it when it comes down to actually executing it. Establishing what the vision is and being able to stick to it is the job, and everyone should be on the same page going in.

I do know that people tend to do their best work when they're challenged and stimulated by their peers.

You just have to go with a good story and a script that you like and people that you like to work with.

Great directors turn in mediocre work and first-time directors turn in exceptional work. No matter how good a person can talk about what he wants, you never know.

Some of the supporting roles that I've done as an actor, I took them because I knew that I would get to watch some of the leading guys in the movies, and also I'd get to work with them.

It would be a sign of society changing if we did finally legalize prostitution. Once it's legal, it doesn't mean your daughter's going to run out and be a ho. The more we sort of bring these things into the light, you bring these hidden vices into the light, the less power they have over our society. You make it legal, it tends to go away.

My dad was an entrepreneurial businessman, and maybe I got some of his ability.

To me, it's the kiss of death when you start winking at the audience as an actor. I just never liked it. I don't like it when we do monologues, looking into the character.