Taika Waititi Quotes

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

I never played the right roles, or very rarely got the right roles offered, except on stage.

What a beautiful art, but what a wretched profession.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

I knew I had to get out. It wasn't a good place to be in. 'Home and Away' is a great place to learn, but it's a machine, and it can chew people up and spit them out.

Doing music to pay bills is an uncomfortable situation. I never wanted to be in that situation.

I don't understand the actor that chooses to play the same role in everything all the time.

I'm actually a thin serious person but I play fat and funny, but only for the movies.

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

If you're not good looking, you're considered a good actor, you know what I mean?

I think audiences are a lot more intelligent than what we give them credit for and understand that an actor is playing a role and that doesn't mean he can't play different types of roles.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

It's easy to actually get the ink on the page, but somehow I've gotta find a way to play this. And I have to find a way to emotionally survive playing this.

There's way too much pain in this business for anyone who doesn't HAVE to write.

My acting range is incredibly limited and narrow, but I'm a good heavy. I'm a good authoritarian figure; I don't know why. "Can you be a cop?" Sure. "Can you be a Marine?" Absolutely. Well, at least in a movie.

The training gave me the building blocks to get through it. A production of that scale, in a theater that big, you are going to struggle to keep your voice at first-run perfectness. All that work I did - the pull-ups and pushups - helped keep my body fit. Hamlet, the show, is a cardiovascular workout of about three hours, never mind the mental, soul-crushing element of it.

No other job in the world could possibly dispossess one so completely as this job of teaching. You could stand all day in a laundry, for instance, still in possession of your mind. But this teaching utterly obliterates you. It cuts right into your being: essentially, it takes over your spirit. It drags it out from where it would hide.

Unfortunately, I think I'm going to be typecast in Hollywood as the kid who can cry. I don't like putting audiences through those emotional ups and downs. I don't want people to think Dana Hill is so depressing all she does is cry. But the parts are so good, I can't turn them down.

There was one day where I had to be hysterical all day, then of course it's going to affect you. You're going to go home and feel drained, or feel like you need to let off steam.

The terrible thing about acting is the stops and starts.

Plays, gentlemen, are to their authors what children are to women: they cost more pain than they give pleasure.

When you invest your time and energy in stuff that drags you down, you die a little bit every day.

I want to do drama - no one really sees that. People just think I'm the funny guy and I can't do anything else, and that's just not true.

One of the more dispiriting things I think about endless touring is hearing the same piece of music over and over again and I end up feeling like a fraud.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.