Quotes from Kevin Spacey

I'm able to hang up the character with the costume at the end of the movie.

You can almost hear people saying, 'We're going to make a movie about an election' and 'We're going to make a movie about a lobbyist.' You can hear the yawning start across the nation.

I feel it's a responsibility for anyone who breaks through a certain ceiling... to send the elevator back down and give others a helpful lift.

Clarence Darrow was a unique and courageous man. Several of my favourite actors have played Darrow... Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy.

If it were not for people who stepped forward and gave me opportunities at a time when I had not proved myself at all, believe me, I would not have a career.

I can imagine there is going to come a time when someone will do 13 hours of a story without breaks.

I remember meeting the likes of Johnny Carson and Jimmy Stewart for the first time and being completely starstruck.

Because my mother was in love with Bobby Darin, I grew up with his records playing in our house all the time.

I was terrible in my first play. After that experience, I had to face that I wasn't good enough to play with the big boys. I had to go away and learn, so I worked in regional theater for three years. I even understudied at the Kennedy Center.

The relationship with the cast has everything to do with how a performance develops, and in a sense that while you're discovering a play in the course of rehearsal with the director, you're also discovering it with your fellow actors. We're all in it together.

Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of 'House of Cards' at once, proved one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge as they've been doing on 'House of Cards' and lots of other shows, we should let them binge.

People sometimes have to be reminded, I'm not Frank Underwood. I'm an actor named Kevin Spacey.

I don't care about my personal acting career anymore. I'm done with it. After 10 years of making movies and doing better than I ever could have imagined, I sort of had to ask myself: 'What am I supposed to do with all of this success that I have had?'

Maybe there are people who are gamers who haven't seen movies I have made, or the movies I have made have made no impression on them at all.

I love doing impressions.

While data can only tell you what has happened in the past, it can in some ways give you a sense of what might be of interest to an audience in the future.

There are ways in which you can make sure that even if people come to the theatre because they know an actor or actress, by the end, they've forgotten that, and they leave going, 'Wow - what an amazing play.'

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.

My life will change, because I want it to change; and also because this is something I'm committed to doing and that I believe my life has been leading towards.

I love producing, I love bringing things together.

I mean we all played as kids. You play games, you take on different characters, you imitate; the fun and the love of play has never left me.

Being an actor sometimes requires that you ask yourself questions you'd rather not know the answers to.

Directing a film was something I was yearning to do. I always wanted to see if I had the capacity to be a good storyteller.

You learn every single day when you're running a company. You learn as you go.