Ashley Benson Quotes

I don't want to ever say to somebody, 'You don't have to see it. It's not good.' I'm done with that. I'd love to just do things that I respect. That being said, I do have two children to put through school, so we'll see if I can put my money where my mouth is, but I would love to just work with people I respect.

I'll admit, sometimes I've paid the bills with acting. You know the phrase, 'It's one for the money, two for the showreel.' I don't want that as a director. I don't want to compromise myself. There's a big old wide world out there. I want to explore it.

I don't play roles everybody likes. I'd rather have a career I'm proud of. Like everyone else, I need to eat. But I'm a very unbusinesslike person, and I keep my price low. I'm not a mass product. I'm not everyone's cup of tea.

I won't make a movie for money ever again.

My concern is to continue respecting my work as I've done since I began as an actor and I could only do that if I'm strong enough to keep on doing what I think best in an artistic way.

I don't attempt to make people uncomfortable; I think that my standards in terms of art and journalism always have necessitated my discomfort.

I don't model unless I think the project is cool, and I don't put my name behind something that I don't genuinely believe in.

I'm not exactly in a position where I get to be super-picky about the roles I get. But I would also never want to be a part of something that I think is poor in taste or doesn't align with what I believe in.

As for Hollywood, there was an offer. But I declined to do it because of certain moral and ethical values.

I have never done intimate scenes on any of my shows, and now, after marriage, it's a complete 'No.'

I would never refuse a film or do a film for a certain amount of money.

I don't work with anybody I don't like, just for the attention.

I don't want to get on the treadmill of earning more money. I'd rather live cheaply and allow myself more freedom. I can honestly say I've never taken a film just for the dough, although I've made some ghastly mistakes.

We have so little control as actors, but there are ways you can maintain your integrity. I have to say I've never compromised myself in this career once. I've never done something I didn't believe in.

I just think I want my work to represent me fully.

I had walked away from the music industry because I had a certain integrity and all that.

I'm not against anything that anybody might want to try to pull off in fiction. Fiction writing has to, at least, always represent a possibility of absolute freedom.

I want to try to apply my abilities sometimes to make families happy, so I have to make movies at a venue that are not gratuitously violent, that are not using bullets and bloodshed, but are using things like magic and fantasy and enchantment and the imagination. To me that's just all positive stuff. But I am eclectic and I still like to make movies for the midnight audience as well.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

I understand that a lot of other actors don't have a choice. They have to eat so they need to work and they'll do films that they're not so proud of. But I've been fortunate enough to be given a second wind, so I try to pick projects I know will provide the audience the kind of escapism they want from me.

Then how can you ever know about the beautiful goodness of Mud? How bad it wants to be things. How bad it wants to get on your legs and arms and take your footprints and handprints and how bad it wants you to make it alive! Mud is always ready to play with you. Seriously you should try it!

I try and avoid thinking of strategy and I tend to stick to my gun of doing things that I like and try to avoid things that I "should" be doing, and stay true to that.

I don't really enjoy working in TV, to be completely honest, even though it's incredibly lucrative, I'm just terrified of not being satiated in a myriad of different ways. It's amazing that I get to create every day, as an actor, or a director, or a writer, and I get to do it in a variety of different genres and worlds and characterizations. I think that's the great privilege of what we do, we get to make believe. I get to go to so many different places, try on different occupations, take on different points of view. That's what's always been sort of alluring.

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.