Ray McKinnon Quotations

With writing fiction, I'm either not courageous enough or just not suited for telling truths in a more conventional way. As an actor, I inhabit those characters as I'm writing them.

When I'm writing something and I'm really into it, that's all I can think about, and it becomes the most important thing in the world to me, and it may not be that, in reality.

'Rectify' is un-busy. It might soothe you, if not distract you, from all you got going on.

I think I'm a better collaborator, in seeing the bigger picture and trying to just help that, and not be so self-centered in whatever my task is, which is being an actor.

Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can't.

'Deadwood' was just a wonderful opportunity for me. Outside of my own things that I've written, I hadn't had the opportunity to play a character with that amount of depth and range.

I love telling stories, whether I'm the human instrument that helps tell that story, or I'm the man behind the curtain.

All the collaborators of storytelling, in film and television, have to be partly self-centered because they need to do their work the best they can, and that's what makes them really good at what they do, but then they also have to be a part of the socialist society, for the greater good.

If you're ever making a television show, don't cast smart actors because they are just a pain in the ass. The moment you start to bullshit them you've lost them, so you have to either know what you're talking about or when you don't talk to them.

From my experience and observing a lot of other people that often times that only happens - a transformational experience or shedding of the skin - happens when we are at the end of our road and there is pain involved. We have to change or we continue to live in that almost intolerable pain.

Rectify is un-busy. It might soothe you, if not distract you, from all you got going on.

There's not a conspiracy to prevent really good writing from being found You have to have the humility to fail over and over and over.