Quotes from John Hawkes

As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling, but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life, that you're making a movie.

It's much more interesting to watch someone who is ill-equipped to solve their problem fight to solve their problem than wallow in the knowledge that they're ill-equipped to solve their problems.

The only thing I do on a computer is play Texas Hold 'Em, really. Obviously my cell phone is a computer. My car is a computer. I'm on computers every day without actively seeking them out.

If a musician wants to be an actor, everyone thinks that's pretty cool. But if an actor wants to play a song, even if they've been doing it for 40 years, that's bad news.

Certainly I've had the experience of thinking a person was one thing, and finding out they were another.

For the last 20 years of my life, I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects, so I'm attracted to good story, writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change.

I'd said to my sweetheart a couple of days before that the SAG and Spirit Award nomination was amazing and I had no attachment to the Academy Award. I knew I was an underdog so I just decided to sleep through the announcement.

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme.

Need I insist that the only enemy of the mature marriage is monogamy? That anything less than sexual multiplicity...is naive? That our sexual selves are merely idylers in a vast wood?

Motive is never easy. Sometimes it occurs to one only later.

She knew there was enormous penalty for what they had done to her - but she could not conceive of that, did not require that: she only wanted a little comfort, a bit of charity; with the awfulness, the unknowable, removed.

Some time ago I discovered that I could no longer speak aloud or read aloud from a stage, even for the sake of hearing the effect that my writer's voice produced on listeners. Now, curiously, the more I merely try to live, the more reclusive I become, the vainer I am. At last I am as vain as the one who instantly voices his silence inside me.

If the birds sing, the nudes are not far off.

The corridor smelled of water in the bottoms of purple vases and the piano was banging just beyond this emptiness.

No appetite. No sensation in a dry stomach. No desire. No orchids sweet enough to taste. Not the sort of woman to eat sandwiches on a bus. At least not the sort of woman who would eat in the dark. Not anymore.

It's tough being an actor making music, because even I have a knee-jerk reaction to that.

It's hard to get concert tickets.

As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling, but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life, that you're making a movie.

I don't really try to judge any character that I play, afterwards I figure it out, but while I'm working on the character, I have to find something in them to relate to.

It's probably odd for someone to read an interview where the interviewee is worried about exposure while they're talking in an interview.

Starting in the mid-'80s, I played in a band called Meat Joy, and we made our own record, toured.

I think we've all been misled, at moments in our lives, certainly in school situations, and things like that, with getting with the wrong group briefly, or falling in with someone who we learn the truth about and no longer want to really be with.

There's a lot of skeletons in my closet!