Quotes from James Spader

Love is the one emotion actors allow themselves to believe.

If I don't need the money, I don't work. I'm going to spend time with my family and friends, and I'm going to travel and read and listen to music and try to learn a little bit more about how to be a human being, as opposed to learning how to be somebody else.

I've had tremendous opportunities in film and continue to have them, but it's such a different thing to do a television show, and I'm very lucky to be able to do them both.

I am not very responsible economically. I have a history working on films for years and years, and by the time I was starting the next film, I was starting from zero again.

If you find great difficulty in trying to reckon with the future or even the present, I think it's intuitive to start that process by reckoning with the past.

People who supported Obama felt like they formed a relationship, that they were being spoken to. The way that campaign worked and the way he's worked during his first term is to make people feel like he's grasping their hand, whether it's by tweeting or email, moments after an event, sometimes during an event. It makes people relate to him.

My career had been split pretty evenly between good guys and bad guys until I finally grew into myself enough to play a decent antihero, where you can combine the two.

I've made a lot of very small movies that may not have had a large initial audience. Then it shows up on cable.

The unknown is very appealing to me. I like to be surprised. I love the idea I might know less at the end of reading something than I do at the beginning.

I'm not someone so much interested in exploring a slice of life unless that is down the corridor, around the corner, up the alley, and down the rabbit hole. That, I like.

There are some actors who are very good at developing things, who have... 'things in the pipeline.' I am abysmal at that kind of thing, loathe it, and am a terrible planner. Unless I'm showing up on the set and acting, I prefer to have nothing to do with the actual business of being an actor.

Sometimes with people their work is the most important thing to them, and sometimes the work enables you to do other things that are more important to you. I probably am closer to that.

If I don't need the money, I don't work.

When doing theater, you have to find great satisfaction in the small things. There's going to be a repetition and a redundancy night after night, but it's the small variations in those moments - a word, a tone of voice, the smallest sense of enlightenment that can happen in an instant onstage - that will be the most rewarding.

Acting for me, is a passion, but it's also a job, and I've always approached it as such. I have a certain manual-laborist view of acting. There's no shame in taking a film because you need some money.

I lost interest in firearms because we had a dog that was scared to death of the sound of a rifle shot.

I didn't watch much television growing up, and before I did 'Boston Legal,' I had no understanding of what it was like for a viewer to look forward to finding out what was going to happen the next week.

I know that one's visibility is very high on television, even with an unsuccessful show! With a successful role, it's even higher.