Quotes from Ron Perlman

You can change the circumstances but you can never change man's inner nature.

Yeah, it's nice to get paid for therapy rather than having to pay $240 an hour for it.

I lost 90 pounds and my blood pressure went down to a normal level and the salt in my urine disappeared. And that was when I had to make the transition from fat character actor to thin character actor.

I like to believe that everyone is born with the same skill set, and that it is the influences that one comes upon.

I've never been pigeonholed and I've experienced so many different kinds of skin - what man will do and won't do, what you should do and shouldn't do. This is what's exciting about being an actor; where philosophy majors sit in classrooms or write books about human behavior, we're actually acting them out in front of cameras.

Distortions control my self-image, like they do for a lot of us. It's irrational.

I love to continue to challenge myself and put myself in situations that are slightly uncomfortable.

I love showing up and giving a performance without the benefit of a lot of rehearsal or dissection. It's fun to me to act on a kind of instinctual level and go straight for the performance.

I just think that there are those people that their resolve is strengthened by what it is that's keeping them down, and there are some people that will buckle under it. You never know which one is which until you get into the eighth or ninth round of the fight.

Somebody who doesn't care if they live or die is the most dangerous human being on earth.

You back a big cat into a corner and somebody is going to get bloody.

Almost all of your life is lived by the seat of your pants, one unexpected event crashing into another, with no pattern or reason, and then you finally reach a point, around my age, where you spend more time than ever looking back. Why did this happen? Look where that led? You see the shape of things.

Every job has a unique situational circumstance.

If something strikes me as insane and unjust, I cannot tolerate that.

I will not do a role that I don't think I can do, that I'm not interested in, where there's no humanity, that doesn't have any kind of handle for me at all because I know I'll just stink the joint up.

There are always great deals of humanity in the characters that have been offered to me.

I've certainly been very blessed with opportunity.

I think in the early part of my career, the roles were so disparate that it never gave anybody an opportunity to understand my essence and what I would be good at doing, as opposed to what I would not be good at doing, so these little moments of beautiful things that were happening to me were consistent, but very few and very far between.

I'll walk through fire to do what I do because the movie business, when it's right, is the coolest art form ever invented.

Well, I don't have an agenda.

I say yes to almost anything that comes my way.

Let me put it this way: I definitely need to understand the villains I play. The best cause pain to anesthetize themselves against their own pain.