Quotes By John Hawkes

I do all kinds of roles - nerd, psycho, nerd, psycho, nerd, psycho - and occasionally someone kind of normal. It's weird, when I lived in Austin I was always cast as pretty normal people. But when I moved to Los Angeles I was immediately branded a psycho.

You never really forget who you are. If you did, you'd need to seek some professional help.

As an actor, you don't often get a chance to know exactly the impact of what the audience is seeing, even though you can ask where the frame is. A move that feels tiny can be huge, and vice versa.

When I over-prepare, I try to let it all go and forget all about it when the camera rolls, so I can just be present with the other actors and allow what's going to happen to happen without too much preconception.

Certainly I've had the experience of thinking a person was one thing, and finding out they were another.

It seems like every year Hollywood makes an attempt to retell the Manson story, and I just couldn't be less interested in it. It's not really our crowning achievement as a civilisation. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but it just bores me.

I have to be careful of what TV shows I choose, particularly ones that have commercials in them, because it's going to be a different kind of television show.

I generally play strong people and scary people.

Some friends of mine bothered me for a long time about getting on the social networking pages. They were close friends that I liked to mess with, and I think that I kind of enjoyed for a while that it bothered them so much. Now they've just kind of given up.

Hitchhiking was such a pure form of existence. You'd wake up in the morning, and you'd have no idea what your day was going to be. And that's something I've never been able to shake. I loved that.

I want people to believe me when I play a part and they are less apt to if they know a lot about me and have associations about me.

I'd said to my sweetheart a couple of days before that the SAG and Spirit Award nomination was amazing and I had no attachment to the Academy Award. I knew I was an underdog so I just decided to sleep through the announcement.

Starting in the mid-'80s, I played in a band called Meat Joy, and we made our own record, toured.

I maintain that if you're a novelist and you go into an art museum, you'll come out a better novelist. And if you paint a picture for an hour you're a better actor at the end of it.

I met Robert Rodriguez working on a movie called 'Roadracers.'

I went to a performance of 'The Crucible' at the Guthrie when I was a sophomore in high school, and I knew right away that that's what I wanted to do.

There's a lot of skeletons in my closet!

My fear now is of cliche, of complacency, of not being able to feel authenticity in myself and those around me.

I don't mean to be highfalutin about it, but I try to limit my visibility.

It's nice to sometimes get things out of life, rather than stealing from other artists. I'm trying to steal from the real people.

As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling, but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life, that you're making a movie.

If you're telling a story it's always best not to play the ending.

I lived in Texas for 10 years.

It's not like every director in every movie is seeking me out by any means, there are a lot of things I'm not suited for, a lot of things I'm not interested in, and a lot of things that directors wouldn't be interested in me for.

I understand why people achieve a level of fame and disappear, I never understood it before, but it's an attractive prospect to walk away from it all.

It's much more interesting to watch someone who is ill-equipped to solve their problem fight to solve their problem than wallow in the knowledge that they're ill-equipped to solve their problems.

You don't really ever think you're that crazy person you're playing.

I think that no matter how dark a person is, the more you learn about them, the more you understand about their life, the more you can sympathize with them or even root for them.

I don't have actor training myself.

For the last 20 years of my life, I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects, so I'm attracted to good story, writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change.