Jeff Bridges Quotes

Stage fright is not a thing about 'Am I any good?' It's about 'Am I gonna be good tonight?' It's a right-now thing. It helps me. If I went out there thinkin', 'Eh, we'll go slaughter 'em,' I'm positive something would go seriously wrong.

I still take it seriously, but once I go out there I think I've got more relaxed and I think it shows.

As the actor, you can't be worried about the scene that you're going to playing two days from now. You think about what's going on right now and in the moment. That's what you worry about.

There were times at the start of it all when I would be standing, terrified, in front of the cameras and people I considered 'real' actors. I had no idea what was happening, what the guy with the clipboard did, or if people in the studio were looking at me because it was their job to look at me or because they thought I was making a mess of things.

I love drama - I would say more than I even love comedy - but I like in One Mississippi that I can go from a very moving moment to a Willy Wonka tube up my ass. I like the silliness as much as I like drama.

But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.

The only sensible approach is not to take it too seriously. What counts is the writing.

...It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.

I meet Daniel Day-Lewis. He's just sitting in a chair on the set. Now, I had been told that Daniel Day-Lewis was kind of an intense person. And he's really not. He's really THE MOST INTENSE PERSON THAT HAS EVER EXISTED ON THE PLANET OF EARTH. He's not doing anything, he's just sitting in a chair, and I am terrified of him as if a jungle cat has wandered onto the set, like- WHOA! What do we do! Are we supposed to move around a lot or stay perfectly still?! What are the rules of Daniel Day-Lewis?!

Actors tend to get in their own way, a lot. A lot of times you will do things that will screw up your audition process. I was very bad at auditioning, and I always went in to it saying ‘God I hope I don’t screw this up.’ But at the same time, the directors are saying, ‘God, I hope this person is the savior.’ You have to remember is that the worst thing that could happen is you don’t get the job you don’t already have.

We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.

But baseball was different... You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you f****d up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error, but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see? ... You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard. And trying hard, as everyone told him, was wrong, all wrong.

To get to go from stage to set and back, it keeps you feeling very present, and I think that's always such a wonderful thing in your work because you don't really have time to be as neurotic as I might become.

Humor requires perspective. Perspective requires focus. Focus requires balance. Balance requires attention to the present moment. In the 'now' one is freed from labels. Success and failure, good luck and bad—they're all constructs of your mind.

Life is too important to be taken as a joke, but too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

The secret to comedy is not playing the comedy, but actually playing the situation, playing the drama of it.

To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

One of the things you learn at drama school is not to play the result, but just to play the moment.

I don’t take my life seriously, but I do take what I do – in my life – seriously -

It's a sick thing, right: people are afraid of public speaking. I do public speaking, except my public speaking involves the audience only having one type of emotion and one type of reaction. If they have anything other than laughter, it's a failure. That's an absurd thing for a human to try to seek. The main thing to realize is that whatever I say, it's my truth and I believe in it, and if I don't get a laugh off that, then it's not working.

I said, "Oh well, I'll act." I started to study, but I didn't know what I was doing, and I don't know that I was taking it very seriously then.

I don't know how to drive a car. The only thing I can do is act, but it's not something I even feel comfortable doing.

I compare the pressure of a golf shot with making an extra point in basketball. The player starts from a full stop, and that rim doesn't move.

As an actor, I don't know what I'm doing. I've never known what I was doing. I show up the first day, I'm scared, and I just hang out. It's like being in detention - you just wait for it to be over. Then gradually I start to figure out what's going on.