Mark Ruffalo Quotations

People say funny things all the time during really serious moments in life.

People use the Method as a shield; it shields them from being vulnerable. I hear all these young actors who are like, 'I'm Method, I'm gonna go live in the house, you know, I totally get it, I've done it, I've been there', but one thing I know is it kills spontaneity.

I think we've all been kind of... everyone's been hurt, everyone's felt loss, everyone has exultation, everyone has a need to be loved, or to have lost love, so when you play a character, you're pulling out those little threads and turning them up a bit.

What makes Hulk afraid? It's himself. It's a version of himself that's weak. It's a version of himself that's vulnerable. It's a child inside of him.

I remember riding my bike down the boardwalk with nowhere to go and looking at the girls. It was really innocent.

But, the relationships that I see work - As long as they're telling the truth, and saying the things that you don't ever want to have to say to another human being.

The problem to me is violence. It's not cool to kill somebody or hurt people.

They would never let me be a crossing guard when I was a little kid. It would come up, I'd always raise my hand, I would never get picked . They thought I was too wild, but I knew I was responsible enough, if I was given that task.

Also, stick around. Don't lose your heart, just keep going, keep at it.

The true value of somebody in this town is very hard to determine. It's all smoke and mirrors.

I still feel like I'm trying to make it. It's hard to shed the struggling actor thing.

My belief about acting in one foot on a banana peel and the other one in the grave.

Certainly, it's very easy to fall in love with cash. If you're going to make all your decisions based on cash, you're going to have a pretty naffy career.

As we're bombarded with the imagery that we are and now, post 9-11, it's hard not to get hardened by the world and the amount of violence that's allowed to be shown to kids these days.

I had to work on a Marlin boat, like gutting fish, like as the bait boy.

I like to think the movies that I've picked have something worthwhile to say. Something relevant.

I think of marriage as a garden. You have to tend to it. Respect it, take care of it, feed it. Make sure everyone is getting the right amount of, um, sunlight.

I became an actor so I didn't have to be myself.

I don't know, one out of every two marriages ends up in divorce so there's a lot of great people out there who people aren't happy with.

We're warriors, this culture, and we're very puritanical about sex and very embracing about violence and I don't know why that is.

For some reason, my whole life has been, 'You can't do this, you can't do that.

After the brain tumor happened, I realized I love acting, I've always loved it, I may never get a chance to do it again.

Commercials that are geared towards kids. I think they should just, like, wipe them out.

I didn't really have any interest in producing anything.

I enjoyed growing up part of my life in Virginia Beach. We had the ocean and the beach and a beautiful landscape.

She was razzing me on the set, ... 'This movie will bring you up in the world - no more little independents for you.'

Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.

Right now, most actors are personalities and acting is not what they were talking about when I was being taught by these old masters.

My surfboard is a 7-foot-3-inch spoon made by Rip Curl, kind of between a longboard and a shortboard. Surfing brings me into the here and now. It's a dance with the present.

I don't have to be a leading man. I can be a character actor. That's really what interests me anyway.

I didn't apply to any colleges - I lied to all my friends and told them I was going to UCSD, because all their parents would be like, 'Mark, where're you going to college?' and I'd just lie 'cause I felt it was unrealistic to be an actor.

But the frustration of not being seen, not having anyone acknowledge this great talent that I was sure was in me, was really frustrating.

I love acting with kids, cause they're great acting partners. They're totally present. Even when they're acting, they're still available and you can crack them up or something weird will happen and they'll go with it.

I have a very dear family and very dear friends. They're my rock. These are people who knew me from the beginning, you know, as a loser in a 1972 Dodge Dart with the bumper literally duct-taped to the body.

If I'm working in the city, then as soon as I'm home, I try to lock in on my son for a few hours. Every day. I see how important it is that he's starting to come into my world now. It's just an effort to give him that male mode of being.

I did grow up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, around a lot of my mom's family. I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me, and my sisters and my brother. Probably the most formative part of it was that we grew up on the edge of a forest. It wasn't a big forest, but it was enough. When you're a kid, it feels gigantic.

I did a series of these soft-core horror movies called 'Mirror Mirror.' I got killed in 'em all - and each time, I came back as a different character. They were all straight-to-video.

I can't just 'Jim Carrey' something like that, ... I don't have that kind of genius. So I went and hired a clown and we did isolating exercises, where one part of your body does one thing and another part does something else. And then, at 2 in the morning, after working on it for hours, I was lying down, and I thought, 'Oh my God, I've got it now!'

I was an introverted kid; I liked my time alone. And the rest of my family is pretty extroverted, so I felt like a bit of an oddball. They're very gregarious and charming and charismatic people. I always felt like I was struggling as a young person. I think everyone was very surprised to hear that I wanted to be an actor.

My personal belief is that you carry your own water in a relationship. If you see a girl and you think she's hot, that's a very human reaction, but you don't go and tell your spouse that, you know? So in one way it's how you behave.

My mom was a hairdresser. My aunt was a hairdresser. My brother was a hairdresser. My sisters are hairdressers.

I woke up one morning with the knowledge that I had a brain tumor. It wasn't so much that I dreamt I had a brain tumor; it was like someone just poured the knowledge into my head. It wasn't like an image; it was just like knowing. It was so weird, which is why I paid attention.

I was probably 8 years old; my mom let me stay up one night. She's like, 'You have to see this movie.' It was 'A Streetcar Named Desire,' and it was on TV, and it was a big deal. And I saw Marlon Brando, and I was like, 'Oh, my God.' That's where it started.

I was bartending for a long time and going on auditions and was constantly being rebuffed.

Who I am is a conglomeration of probably all the things that have happened to me, so somewhere along the way that works its way into the work.

Well, it's actually funny and romantic, unlike many romantic comedies these days,

Usually, the first night before I start working on a picture, I can't sleep. If it's a particularly difficult scene, I have a hard time sleeping.

You know, fifty percent of the marriages in America end in divorce, and eighty percent of married couples, one or the other has had adultery.

When you get to be a 45-year-old man, you start to realize: 'I know who I am, and I know who I'm not. I know my shortcomings, I know my strengths; maybe some of my shortcomings are my strengths.' You start to face yourself as you truly are.

Witherspoon is a blazingly intelligent and talented actress.

When you're a young actor, and you're really fighting to have your place in the world - for me, anyway - it took a mental focus and energy and striving. It took a long time. And it was my whole life.

With indies, all they have is their script and it's very important to them. The characters are better drawn, the stories more precise and the experience greater than with studio films where sometimes they fill in the script as they're shooting.

With social media, you have this new kind of way to communicate with people that's very immediate, sometimes alarmingly so, sometimes painfully so. If you could just hold some objectivity, a very direct, unfiltered, raw reflection of the way something is landing in the culture without any spin, or filtration, or anything, it's very raw.

Whatever we want to think about American business - work hard, tell the truth, have morality - it's a myth. There's a lot of graft.

'What Doesn't Kill You' is a really great movie that was little seen but, I think, is one of my personal favorites.

You get sick and s- goes wrong and you're bonked - you don't know where you're going to end up, how it's gonna turn out, ... That sort of thing changes you, the way you live your life. It teaches you to take less and less for granted.

I started out in Los Angeles doing plays and bartending. I did at least 30 plays that nobody saw before I got Ride With the Devil.

I've been having a lot of fun with the Hulk motion-capture stuff, actually. The only distinction that I hold is that I am the only actor to ever play Banner and the Hulk.

The sculptor Frosty Myers and I met when we were bidding against each other at an auction. He's an eccentric, a liberal with a collection of rifles, and his stuff is big art. We share a love of tractors. I'm trading him one for a piece of art.

It was a bunch of young girls, ... They were standing in close proximity. I said, 'Hi. How are you?' One of them asked (he puts on a high girly voice), 'Are you Matt from 13 Going on 30 ?' They were nice and everything. But I usually like to be low-key and private.

I've been able to hide behind the character in Eternal Sunshine . People don't recognize me from Collateral . But this feels more exposed.

Sometimes, as an actor, you're so deeply immersed in a part that you lose control of it. If you're really lucky, a few times in your life it'll take you somewhere you never expected to go. It really blows the top off your understanding of your craft.

Sometimes I catch her looking at me a bit more amorously than usual. It certainly is the type of thing that doesn't hurt a love life. She keeps me in check when 13-year-old girls come running up to me.

The one great thing about a continuing collaboration is that they know you. And if you're really lucky, they really believe in you and think that your talent has some unending bounds to it.

You really can have your dreams and at the same time have a family. But it has to be a really deliberate practice.

This country consumes more pornography than any other country in the world.

They say it was 37 bodies found, but many people think it was twice that count. It's set in the period of the '70s. It centers on my relationship with a loose-cannon reporter. It's also about the five different police forces who came together to find this killer during a time when there were no fax machines, no Internet and it was hard to share information.

It seems like they conflate Bruce and the Hulk. It's usually, 'Hulk!' as I'm walking across the street. But sometimes it's 'Banner!' If you go on my Twitter feed, you'll see it's mostly Hulk. I think it was pretty spectacular what we were able to accomplish with CGI with 'The Hulk,' and I can't take full credit for that.

It's a difficult undertaking. I've been married for four years and I see this movie as a cautionary tale about people who've gone deeply out of communication.

It's not my favorite genre, generally, ... But I want to do it. I wanted to try my hand at it, because I was hearing around town, people saying that I couldn't do it. 'Mark Ruffalo can't do comedy. Mark Ruffalo can't be a romantic lead.' And so I was like, 'Those are fighting words, my friend.'

It's been up, down, and sideways for me, man. I could become a huge star, or I could get cancer tomorrow.

It's imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame.

I want to do a western. Nobody does westerns anymore.

I love 'The Sportswriter' by Richard Ford. Ford really captures for me the bittersweetness of the quietly suffering American man. It's stoic, sad, and really beautiful.

I mean, I think I admire my wife the most out of anyone. She's really smart, in a practical way that I don't have. We balance each other.

I knew playwrights and stage directors before I ever knew filmmakers,

I have two hammocks, one Mayan and one Guatemalan, both family size because I like to lie in them perpendicular. When I'm working on a character, I lie in them and daydream. They're the best tools for working that I have.

I like doing the action and the romantic comedy stuff,

I'm sacrificing part of my anonymity which I enjoy to have more options as far as what I can get off the ground. It's a give and take sort of thing.

I'm the lead inspector in the Zodiac case. It's a great part.

If you're not yelling at your kids, then you're not spending enough time with them!

In the past 10 years since I've been doing independents and occasionally a studio movie, studio movies are starting to look more like independents and independents are starting to look more like studio movies. Both of them see that they can make money. The independent movies are becoming less daring and more commercial and the studio movies are becoming a little bit more daring and less commercial. So it's kinda a weird times.

I never used to get photographed and people asking for autographs. I don't mind the autographs, but the paparazzi I find weird. As an actor, you want to be able to regard the world instead of having it regard you.

I don't like to go to the gym very much if I can help it.

I don't like this idea of Method. I come from that school, but what I was taught was that it's your imagination. You do your homework, and you use your imagination.

For the longest time, I was Scott Ruffalo's brother. I mean, he was the mayor of Beverly Hills. He was just so beloved there.

A home life where it's so full of so many rigorous ideas about the way things should be, this word "should," I think is absolutely toxic to children. It hurts their personalities, it hurts their points of view in the world, it hurts their ability to be open and caring and curious. An element of allowance in a family, is, I think, really a positive thing.

When you're on the road, you sort of go crazy and being away from your family you get stir-crazy and lonely, so I try to keep myself involved as much as possible.

I guess the biggest lesson would be to have faith in that little part of yourself that knows what it's doing, knows what it wants, knows what you should be doing, even when all the clamour around you is telling you something else. That's the part that you want to keep alive and that's the part that people want to see when they see you on the screen.

"What is normal?" really becomes the question. What is normal, and how are we fooled into thinking it's something other than what we're doing at any given time. Every family has either a drug addict or an alcoholic or some sort of dysfunction that the family is dealing with. And I think the grace of this family is that they actually could be that far out there but also be forgiving, and be really human, and be human in front of each other without much shame.

The fact that I can make a living and support three kids and my wife doing what I love to do... who does that? That's golden. It's a very privileged thing.

There's a misperception about actors that we actually choose the roles we end up doing - it's more that we're chosen for them.

As an actor, I started using dreams more, which is not mystical or anything like that. I just found that I've been using that as a tool to give me another point of view towards the work. It's often surprising but really helpful.

Each role, I feel like takes you on a different journey based on who that character is.

When you're trying to do character work that's different from what people expect from you, you're sort of in territory that is uncharted, and you don't know how it's playing all the time.

As an actor, you want to remain vulnerable. You don't want to always have all the answers and you want to be fine doing things in the moment with your fellow actors.

I'm very nervous in the beginning and then I get in there and start doing my work and I feel more comfortable.

There's a level of trust that you have to have with somebody.

Even if my movies weren't big blockbusters, directors generally liked me, so they would fight for me.

Artists have always been the front line; that's part of our responsibility. But a lot of the big actors come out, they get slammed, and then they retreat.