Liev Schreiber Quotations

The skill set for hockey is so specific to skating and if you haven't been skating as a kid it's impossible to play - and I wasn't a skater.

I'm misrepresented as a scary person. I'm not. It's all about my size and my eyebrows.

Every girl I've gone out with has said something to me first.

Style, no matter how outrageous it is, is still an expression of someone's personality. And my personality is somewhere stuck in the classics.

You watch a hockey game, and the hand-eye coordination and the speed is really miraculous; how those guys track the puck alone, just following it with their eyes.

You know, I have a deep, deep affinity for Dr. Seuss.

I think that everything I've ever done at some point is part of someone else's legacy.

If you fall in love with somebody you're working with, fine, but wait till your project is over.

My publicist told me not to talk about politics but, yes, I think we have a president who stole the election.

There's the private persona and the public persona and the two shall never meet

I think New York will always be this incredible international crossroads, and I don't think that will ever change.

I find that the most interestingly written parts happen to be the bad guys.

I didn't think that a career in theater was very realistic so I thought the only thing I could make money doing and still be somewhat artistic was, god help me, advertising.

I think it's really, really important to mix it up as an actor, to try to get as much kind of varied experience as you can, not only for your own personal growth as an actor but for the audience to keep them guessing about what you're going to do.

And I think for me theres a lot of neurosis involved with where you should be or thinking about where you are all the time instead of being where you are.

I'm kind of an obsessive-compulsive person, like, neat obsessive.

I'm not that interested in working with impervious people.

No, I grew up admiring people who played ice hockey.

I am so used to being able to express myself from being an actor. So when people don't understand me, I'm just completely lost.

I get very nervous around famous people and I get nervous around beautiful women.

I was always drawn to tough girls. I liked that domineering thing.

I'm actually a very bad surfer, which is good because everybody likes a bad surfer. Nobody likes a good surfer.

It's good to overexpose yourself with work. But don't expose yourself too much with the press.

I live with an 18-month-old Jack Russell named Chicken. He moved in about 15 months ago, and it was very hard at first because I work a lot and he doesn't.

I love having that creative discussion where, at the end of the day, you both feel better for having done it. Maybe it's a typically Jewish thing, where you sort of go at each other.

My grandfather was an athlete who worked as a butcher by day, but at night he taught himself to paint and play the cello. He was a very cultured man,

I always wondered about my grandfather's story. What was his life really like as a young man?

I have a pathological memory problem and when he died I was very angry and worried that somehow I wouldn't remember him,

I had wanted so much to make this a European film. Jonathan and I compared stories of our grandfathers. I wanted to show their survivors' sense of humor: If you believe your life is excrement then you either drown in it or transcend it with irony. That's a distinct Eastern European trait.

I did everything that my father did in trying to find him because I didn't live with him,

If this wasn't as important to me and my family, I wouldn't have done it, ... I'm done, but today I went to check the mix. You're never really done.

He was very supportive of me, ... He saw every single play I did in New York. I'll never forget looking out into the audience and watching my brother, who was 40 years younger than my grandfather, sleeping in his chair during some of my early plays. My grandfather Alex never fell asleep.

I think that for me, I'm in a great place. I work all the time, I hang out in fancy hotels, and I do interviews all day, and I get free coffee.

My model of casting comes from Eastern Europe and part of the ideology there is that culture and place are essential,

I was out of my head. I was really frantic, ... I guess I was always under the misconception that a director makes the film, and it's not true. A director directs the people who make the film.

When you're in a place like New York or D.C. you just can't beat it, and it's so hard to recreate because they are both such distinctive places.

There has been some updating. It's really quite smart.

When you have this structure of a stranger in a strange land, it is essential that the place and characters be really authentic.

Well, I don't think I've ever been a huge target for the press, and I value that to a degree, because there's a certain value for actors staying beneath the radar so they can play characters.

We talked about our grandfathers and their senses of humor and our sense of culture and history, and we had a lot in common,

When I read Jonathan's story, I said, 'This is just too weird and too serendipitous,'

There's something insanely sweet about him. And he is a very, very, very good-natured person. He is a truly kind person. I put him in some of the worst circumstances that you could put a human being in and there were homeless guys who I'd hired to be in the movie because I liked the way they looked, and they complained sooner than Elijah did.

I spoke to (director/historian Peter) Bogdanovich, who knew him personally,

This movie questions whether the tragedies and disasters that are happening are man-made or do they collectively add up to something wicked this way comes, ... Fear has a tremendous power both socially and politically now. What's more relevant than anxiety of the unknown?

It's a survivor's sense of humor, maybe even a Jewish sense of humor. Because of the difficulty of life for many Eastern Europeans - the pogroms, the Revolution, the Holocaust - their humor is broad and aggressively and ridiculously comic. It also triggers an emotional response. It's that kind of chaos and absurdity that results in an opening-up to a discovery of deeper emotion.

It was really overwhelming to see the way that people responded - the kind of class and grace, and compassion and support, and resourcefulness that people showed. It was almost like rather than knocking us down, Sept. 11 kind of stepped us up. I was very impressed with that. It showed me that there's really nothing we can't handle.

It was incredibly cathartic after spending eight hours in an editing room being frustrated by the filmmaking process to be able to go out and say the 'F' word 104 times,

Then I forgot about it when I had to go to work.

It's strange - well for me anyway - to be inundated with all this attention, and as a couple we have to struggle to keep our personal life personal.

That is the major coup of the film.

I loved the writing part of it, but the learning curve on the actual filmmaking was steeper than I thought,

I flew in from Prague and in the end it wasn't so bad. Now that I'm here I love it, I absolutely love it.

I know I have the potential to care in the way that he did because of this film,

I really liked the idea of delivering an American character who defied some of the cultural cliches we have been exporting to the rest of the world. A character who was awkward, vulnerable, young, innocent, neurotic, somewhat alien,

I just couldn't think of anybody in show business with better eyes.

I didn't know how to begin to mourn him. He had been the pivotal figure in my life.

If eyes are the portals of the soul, Elijah's got garage doors.

I can sense that there's something that I need to decompress from, but I just don't have the time right now. I think the trick is not to look back. If I stop and realize what I've been through, I think I would probably faint.

I want to forget what I've learned about the character, but the reality is that you can't, because you've absorbed it. It's there in that moment when you need it. The hard part is to trust it.

The best gig is the one you've got.

I direct in the same way that I act, which is thinking about what the scene needs.

When you're in a place like New York or D.C. you just can't beat it, and it's so hard to recreate because they are both such distinctive places.

That's one of the benefits of working on big budget films. You work with people who have a lot of experience and you get to learn a lot.

If you are going to remake a film, you may as well remake a classic.

I was always curious about motivation and intention, and really, that's a lot of what acting is.

As soon as you know what you're doing, you're doing it wrong.

Some actors need to be rattled and some need to be focused

As soon as you know what you're doing, you're doing it wrong. That's what I find with acting. As soon as it becomes padded, it becomes pat.

You know, I have a deep, deep affinity for Dr. Suess.

I am struggling, though. It’s f-cking hard. So little sleep. It’s 23 hours and 59 minutes of exhaustion. They do one little thing in that last minute that is just so compelling and fascinating that it makes the other 23 hours and 59 minutes worthwhile.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

I manage to hide in my movies.

I really don't think there is anybody in the business with better eyes than Elijah Wood.

There's something cathartic about swearing 150 times after spending ten hours in the editing room.

Actors, you know, they're often awkward people in real life.

I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.

I'm drawn to people who share that sense of loss. All actors are trying to repair damaged relationships. I think that might be why I've been drawn to other actors.

And you know, I hate to admit this, but I don't always think in terms of Shakespeare. When I eat, I do. When I'm at a restaurant, I'll think, 'Hmm, what would Macbeth have ordered?'

Part of what I enjoy about the theatre and acting is that sense of history.

I really do think that if you're doing your job right, you're never gonna be what the other actor was, but you can be influenced by his intelligence and his choices.

I'm a typically lazy person. It is sort of characteristic of actors.

The funny thing is that I write and I act a lot about being Jewish, but I don't really think about it as a regular person.

Where else do you find great directors? Acting is one of the places.

Particularly with the plays I choose, they're good parts, and they're parts that have been around long before a bad actor played them, and will be around long after I play them. Part of what I enjoy about the theatre and acting is that sense of history.

You always have to create the character from the ground up.

Everyone assumes that novelists are smarter and more interesting. They're generally smarter and more interesting, but they're often very short. So it kind of cancels all the smart and interesting stuff out.

Film is such a bizarre vehicle for acting. It's such a bizarre experience. I don't think you ever really get familiar with it. If you do get familiar with it, you're probably not that good anymore.

The celebrity mill is so active these days that actors can make careers out of being themselves, and I don't know that I want to. I think I'm just figuring out how to make a career out of not being myself. It's hard.

You should never ask actors about politics.

I think people respond to truthful, simple narrative, and the more you try to dress it up to try and do something else, the harder it is for people to relate to.

Pitching. You're pitching yourself constantly which is probably why there are so many plays about sales. I think also it's like life.

You can think about your career or you can think about your job. I like to think about my job.

I've always been more interested in the audience than I have in the plays. I like that idea of all those people sitting in the dark together. It's kind of fun.

Ever since I was a little kid I was obsessed with films, and I always wanted to make them

I get panic attacks in big crowds.

I am very good with dialects, but the two that I can't do for some reason are the South African and Australian.

I actually loved Winnipeg. Everyone told me I was going to hate it, but it was great.

Call me communist, but I think that's something that everyone, regardless of their family's income, has a right to, and I was fortunate enough to have a mother who felt that way as well.

A lot of times in Hollywood you're as good as your last job.

Don't hit people; don't let it get you too angry; remember that everything you do can and will be used against you. And take a breath and have some perspective.