Quotes from Kevin Spacey

Why not sit around a Beverly Hills pool collecting residual cheques? That is not the kind of life I want.

People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.

I find it sad that by not talking about who I sleep with, that makes me mysterious. There was a time when I would have been called a gentleman.

If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!

Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higer the fences get.

Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.

I went through a period of great rebellion within my family, when I was about 9 or 10. I was mad, I had no focus, had no real interest in anything, and so I started to do things that were just rebellious and stupid.

My admiration for 'Mary Tyler Moore' is very, very big because they went out on top.

I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.

For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.

I became a bit of a jerk. A kind of a nasty jerk.

I terribly miss - we all miss, I think - somebody like the great producer Irving Thalberg. He had a foot in both camps: He understood us creative people. And he understood the money people.

I think that what is truly unfortunate is when an entire party makes a decision that they're going to block every single thing that a president wants to accomplish. It's very - it's very hard to get anything done in those circumstances.

I would love to do much more singing; it's just one of those things where I can't quite describe what it feels like when you're standing in front of a forty piece orchestra, and there's nothing between you and an audience but a microphone. It's like strapping yourself to a locomotive, and I love it.

To look in the eyes of audiences and see the kind of naughty glee that they got with being on the inside, the audience becomes your co-conspirators.

As an actor, you're always nervous as to what a director will do with something.

You have to always be ready, always be alive, and always be willing to move in a new direction.

There's no doubt that some of the greatest films ever made have come from the theater. It's all a matter of finding a way to make the theater experience watchable on film.

As long as we, in the United States, continue to insist that our politicians have to spend all of their time raising millions of dollars for television ads, it will be corrupt. If we leave it up to the politicians to clean up lobbying and finance reform, nothing is going to change.

I'm used to people thinking I'm nuts. And you know what? I kind of love it.

If there is one thing I object to, it's actors talking about how tough their jobs are.

I've always found it strange that a director can hire any designer he wants from any country. But if he hires a foreign actor, it's like he's stolen the crown jewels and run across the river with them.

Bobby Darin was one of the first to take black musicians on the road with his band, and there were places that didn't want him to play, and he stood up to it.

There does seem to be in the U.S. now an ideology and an entrenchment that has stopped people doing what they are hired to do, which is govern rather than run for office the whole time.