Quotes from David Carradine

Most actors spend a lot of time training themselves to be an actor. And I kind of didn't do that. I just started doin' it in front of an audience and had to deliver.

I've known Daryl Hannah for 20 years. She's kind of a friend of the family. Anyway, I've been hot for her ever since 'Blade Runner.'

I went to college at San Francisco State and supported myself working the graveyard shift at a brewery and did a little theater. It was great. I'd do Shakespeare and stuff like that.

Most of the things that have happened in my life have been pretty arbitrary. I walk into a room, and someone hits me with a two-by-four, and that changes my life. I'm not sure what I've learned from anything.

I've worked with a lot of real heavy hitters, and Quentin is maybe heads and shoulders, at least a forehead, above just about anybody I've ever worked with.

There's tons of members of the Carradine family. It's more like a clan than it is like a family, and it's rare that we can get a bunch of them together. We do once in a while.

You know, I've never actually really believed that death is inevitable. I just think it's a rumor.

That's Quentin. He's an absolute master of his own fate. If he agrees with you, he'll change his mind instantly. If he thinks that he's right, there's no way you can get him to change his mind.

I'm like a renegade and that rubs people wrong.

I went to 17 different schools when I was a kid. Every time I went to school, no matter what I talked like, it was always from the wrong place.

It's weird, because everywhere I go, people yell, 'Grasshopper!' or 'Bill!' but down there in Mexico or Colombia or anywhere in South America or most of Europe, people will yell, 'Serpent's Egg!' And I'll go, 'Wow, man, these people are really hip.'

Tarantino is the coolest damn guy; he's just so much fun to work with. He might be the best director I've ever worked with. He just seems to know how to do it and he knows how to make you feel good about it. He's having so much fun you start having fun. You can't help it.

'Kung Fu' was never cancelled; I just left. I decided I had enough of it, and I thought I should do a movie right away, because I think when you leave a television series, it's important that you establish the fact that you're a movie actor really quickly, or you might never get that chance.

My big fight is not in the movie and I don't understand that decision but I know he's right about it, whatever it is. Quentin did not hire me because I'm a kung fu expert; he hired me because he liked to listen to me talk.

I don't need to convince anybody that I know kung fu, but maybe somebody needs to know that I really can act, without doing a Chinese accent or a funny walk.

My role in kung fu - in the art of kung fu, not the series - is not as a practitioner. My role is that of an evangelist, which is an entirely different thing.

With my father, there was one baseball game, one football game, one fishing trip. You got one of everything. And that was all you got. It was enough, though, and I adored him. He was a god to me.

In the second installment, I pretty much dominate the show. Somehow or another, though, I manage to apparently dominate the first show pretty well with just my voice and my hands and a shot of my boots kicking cartridges out of the way.

There are wonderful films that become studio films, but they're conceived independently. That's where the action is. 'Being John Malkovich' is a great example of a picture you wouldn't think the studios would want, and it turns out to be a movie that touches everybody's heart.

Quentin and I were constantly finding something new that we had in common and comic books were one of them. I think we were talking about comic books much earlier in our relationship, before I had the part.

Why would you be afraid of death? It would be an inconvenience. I have a lot of undone things and it's bound to get in the way. But, no, it doesn't scare me at all.

It was pretty extensive - we worked out 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 3 months, which I think is more than anybody in the Olympics. I thought well I don't need this, the girls need it, but it was a gift.

I'm analytical as an actor, and one of the things Quentin did was free me from that.

Quentin is very organic; there was no way that he was going to put someone else's hand in there and anyway, my hands are kind of famous. It seemed right.