Top 30 Michael Shannon Quotes

If I were God, I would just be up there scratching my head, thinking, ‘What the hell am I supposed to do with this?’ For everyone helping an old lady across the street, there’s someone else bludgeoning a person to death. And sometimes they’re the same. How can He separate us all out?

It’s always very daunting to play someone who actually existed. You have to honor that, and be specific and accurate and try to make people believe that you’re that guy, which is really hard.

Let’s point out the elephant in the room: Actor bands are not notoriously successful enterprises. I can’t think of any.

Everybody’s constantly being destroyed and rebuilding themselves, some more drastically than others.

Well, I think anybody who’s had a baby can tell you that once you have a baby, they kind of become the main focus. I don’t think there’s gonna be a lot of room for anything else.

I think if you watch a lot of what I do, you’re going to ultimately walk away seeing me. I can’t hide – that impression is a personal impression people have of me.

I enjoyed living in Chicago and doing plays for little or no money. I never actually thought that I would leave Chicago, originally. I wasn’t one of those people that had a plan to pack up the van and drive out to Hollywood. I didn’t want to.

My dad used to say, ‘You have to become part of the machine to beat the machine,’ and there’s some validity in it. But honestly, even when I’m inside the machine, you still see me. I stick out a little bit.

I never went into acting to be able to scare everybody. If I’d wanted to frighten people, I could have joined the C.I.A.

One of the reasons I got into acting to begin with is that I was trying to figure out how life worked. It was interesting to me to try and follow how other people, real or imaginary, would deal with problems, because I was trying to deal with my own problems.

The thing about New York is, more than any other place I’ve ever been, you run into people on the street that you would never imagine you’d see, old friends, people just like there for a day or two. I find that all the time when I’m walking around Manhattan, running into people that I had no idea were even there.

I know this’ll sound obnoxious, but acting was very much an accident for me. I didn’t have, like, posters of Marlon Brando in my bedroom when I was growing up.

If Mother Theresa went to Atlantic City, I don’t think she’d start playing Blackjack.

There’s nothing routine about ‘Boardwalk Empire.’ It’s like being in some secret society where they call you up and tell you where to go: ‘Meet us at the corner of such and so.’

That’s one of the great things about acting – you get to pretend you’re somebody else, which is great if you get bored with yourself.

It’s obviously a lot harder to try and be a good guy than it is to be a bad guy. The world is a fundamentally evil place, it seems like. So in order to be a good person, you have to fight temptation and vice.

One of the great things about acting is you can do things that in real life would get you in trouble. I think that’s something I figured out pretty early on.

I’ve always been happy just to be working. It doesn’t really matter for me how many people are familiar with my name or my picture, or whatever.

There are certain ways of being that people don’t find acceptable or very pleasant in regular life, but you go out on stage and do pretty much the same thing and they find it spellbinding.

The stage is a routine. It keeps you grounded, like a metronome. I find that soothing.

I like to play characters that get to do it all – to have a bit of comedy here and a bit of pathos here and a bit of suspense here, that’s what’s fun.

I don’t pick my roles by genre; that’s kind of silly.

Everything that happens on Wall Street only fortifies my opinion that there is in fact a more ludicrous industry than the entertainment industry.

If you don’t believe there’s some organising principle, or somebody up in the sky pulling the strings, then it can be very stressful. And nature itself is very arbitrary – it’s not malevolent or benevolent; it doesn’t even know we’re here.

I’ve known a lot of religious people. My mother is very religious, but she also is very private about it. When I was growing up, she never went to church. She just prayed and read her Bible and kept it to herself. I’m not from a background of flamboyant believers. It’s much more a personal issue.

If you give me enough time, enough leash, I can become pretty reasonable.

I’ve never worried about anything in my life a fraction of the way I worry about my daughter. It’s much more than hoping people like the play you’re in, or that your outfit doesn’t look bad. It’s the real deal.

When I’m working, I don’t wake up and say, ‘OK, time to go be intense.’ I just look at whatever scenes we’re working on that day and break them down – just real intense everyday work.

I get pretty attached to the majority of the characters I play. I can’t help myself.

I just keep working on things I like, and hope for the best. I hope people enjoy them.