Jesse Eisenberg Quotations | Page 2

I'm hardly the most notable person in 'Zombieland.' The other actors in it are way more famous than I am.

I prefer playing characters that are going through turmoil. Most movie characters are just in service to the story.

You can tell when you watch a movie, usually, what the actors' experience was on the movie, because even the smallest of roles were interesting.

Who walks around proud of things they've done? That's an obnoxious quality.

In New York, everybody is their own celebrity, so they're not so interested in other people.

I write plays, and I have a musical that's starting to get produced now. That's what I would love to do, but it's so hard. The only reason people are reading my plays and musicals is because I'm in movies.

I personally don't feel the need to be radical for its own sake, but I probably couldn't if I tried anyway.

I meet people who are in movies, and the stuff that they write is terrible, but nobody tells them that because they're famous. So I worry that my stuff might be like that, too.

If you're afraid of everything out there, you quit going out there.

I think I'm an abstinence symbol. If I take my shirt off, people will not have babies.

Don't be a hero, live to fight another day.

Poor people are gross and they 'smell bad

Acting is a weird profession. It's very disquieting, and at the time it just made me so confused. It's only when you step away from a movie for several weeks or months that you start to put things in perspective.

I grew up in an apolitical household. I never left the country. When I became an adult, I started traveling and became interested in politics, and I probably talked about things in a silly, ignorant way.

I feel like when I was 13 and I had to go to bar mitzvahs every weekend. This is the same feeling. You have to put on a suit every weekend to go meet with a bunch of Jews.

I just can't - I can't exist in normal group situations. A classroom, where you have to sort of jockey for position, compete for attention - I would just withdraw.

I find it very difficult to do normal things without getting approached.

All of my pleasures are guilty, but that's just the way I'm wired.

I've never had tastes of people my own age. All of my friends when I was 15 were in their 40s. I'm not actually mature, just very self-conscious around people my own age because I feel like I'm supposed to act the same way they act and I don't know how.

I give credence to the worst things somebody writes about me, and if somebody writes something nice, I think they're wrong or false or lying or joking.

The only way to be turned off to being famous is to be famous. And I only have like a tiny, tiny bit of that, and I'm already disgusted by it. But I realize that the only way to be disgusted by fame is to be famous, because otherwise it looks amazing. Then people stop you on the street, and it's like the most annoying thing in the world. The first time it happened it's great, and then the second time you have to shake somebody's hand...

The old cliché in theater is, if you’re nervous, pick up a prop, which will immediately take you outside of your mind.

Often times, being in a popular thing means that you have to compromise your own acting.

My mom always said that she didn't wear a red nose and big shoes because that's the reason people are scared of clowns. My dad is a sociology teacher, so he probably figured that out with her. Those are the things that are exaggerated, that don't give off the signals of humans. You know, if you draw a picture of a circle and ask somebody to feel empathy with the circle, they won't. But if you draw literally two, three dots inside the circle, like two eyes and a nose, you immediately feel empathy.

I am actually going to two therapists right now. I don't know, I actually feel like therapy has just made me more uncomfortable.

Where I feel something that I had written was misinterpreted in a way that made people feel bad, that is absolutely horrifying to me. I feel so embarrassed and I feel ashamed that I should make people feel bad.

I don't attribute an actor's great success to their own individual performance when it's something as collaborative as a movie.

When cellphones came out, my girlfriend refused to get one for five years, because she thought it would turn her into somebody who couldn't connect with other people - and, of course, she got a cellphone.

I purposefully isolate myself from anything that has to do with any press. I don't read any press about myself.

I'm not into music - the only music I like is musical theater, but I have every Ween album.

No one should be offended - that's not my style.

I feel things can always be funny, but that's probably because I have some kind of leftover childhood need to make people laugh. For somebody like me, that's the thing you excel at.

The ideal way to approach a character is to find something in yourself that relates in some way.

I don't understand capri pants. They seem like neither here nor there.

I cried every day of first grade. In class. Which meant I ended up getting comfortable emoting in a place where it wasn't the norm.

I think it's a room full of insecure actors, which is ultimately very comforting.

Society will decide after the technology is created what we will and won't accept.

Actually, acting in bumper cars is terrible, because the really only way to film it and get a close up is to literally mount the camera - this heavy thing on the car and it's just the worst because you can't act at all with a thing on the car.

No compliment is ever sufficient and every insult, of course, is true.

I think there are probably a lot of actors like me who I think probably struggle to feel comfortable in their own lives, and acting in some ways provides a safe context for them to live out emotions that they possibly repress or live out experiences that they are not afforded by virtue of circumstance.

The happiest moments for me, creatively, are doing readings of a play around a table where there's no audience.

I've never worked during the summer. I take summers off.

People think, 'You're an actor, you can afford clothes,' but I just try to take the clothes from the movie, which makes the selecting of film projects that much more difficult, because you try to play characters that might wear something you'd want to wear.

I have one female fan. But she lives with me. I'm not aware of any others.

Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we're all heroes of our own lives.