Joaquin Phoenix Quotes

I'm afraid of being too sure, to just deliver. I think that's the biggest danger for actors - after a certain time, when you're known and recognised, people expect you to do what you're supposed to do, and there's almost no more criticism and that's very dangerous.

The idea of dancing is the only thing that scares me.

I'd always tried not to worry about the size of the role or the size of the film.

I can't stand to see myself act. It just makes me cringe.

It's a great stretch for me to do my game show. It's very hard. It's not me at all. The only part that's me is sort of when I'm sitting in the booth looking tormented. That's the only part that's the real me.

I worry a lot about what people think. I worry people think I'm not helping them enough, that they don't like my music, that I'm playing a song too fast or talking too fast. I worry my wife isn't happy with our relationship... I'm afraid somebody's going to take my career away from me. That it's going to go away, or I'm going to get fired.

I had no confidence as a child; I still really don't. Acting is the only thing I've ever felt comfortable doing.

I'm never really happy with anything I do.

I really don't like to act. At the beginning, back in '51, I had to force myself to stick with it. I was real uncomfortable, real uncomfortable.

Being an actor is easy, just picture someone in a room and you outside waiting for your cue to go in. Elliot Gould's been trying that for forty years.

If you ask any of the other actors, they'd probably say nice things because they're nice people, but I was always like, "Oh gosh, I hope I'm doing this right." I was very hard on myself, and I continue to be. That's why it's sometimes hard for me to digest watching myself on television. There is some pressure.

I beat myself up in the studio because I know that a lot of people are expecting me to fail.

I'm really excited that people are receiving my performance like this. It makes me feel good, because I've been working really hard. And this character [Idi Amin], I worked particularly hard on. But I don't want to get too caught up in it, because first of all, it could lead to a great disappointment. You never know what's going to happen.

You don't know what you're doing. You're just hoping that people won't make fun of you. I had no idea how it would turn out.

I'm always excited to carry more and more weight and responsibility within a story. It's all about putting my time in and showing people that I'm good and responsible and, hopefully, kicking ass in every frame.

It's not easy that everything you do, everybody has to come in and critique it and give their opinion. Sometimes it does help me and sometimes it hurts me as a person. That's life. I have feelings.

Emotionally, I feel mostly out-of-depth, like I will never quite learn how to be what I should be. And that makes me feel pretty vulnerable a lot of the time.

I was frequently told at drama school that I was thinking too much.

I'm not an angry person, just very disappointed and contemptuous of my fellow humans' choices - and on stage those feelings sometimes are exaggerated for a theatric stage - you're on a stage you have an audience of 2500 or 3000 people: you need to project the feelings, the emotions it's heightened, and people mistake it for a personal anger but it's more dissatisfaction, disappointment and contempt for these things we've settled for.

In politics people throw themselves, as on a sickbed, from one side to the other in the belief they will lie more comfortably.

We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing. If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people’s choices. If I feel good about my body, I don’t go around making fun of other people’s weight or appearance. We’re hard on each other because we’re using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived deficiency.

From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied.

It's not a field, I think, for people who need to have success every day: if you can't live with a nightly sort of disaster, you should get out. I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that the ghosts you chase you never catch.

I used to be a chemical-engineering student, but I started studying acting, and I went for a cattle call, up against hundreds of people. They tore me down because I was too tall. They said "How tall are you?" "6'5"." "Next."

Most writers or performers walk around with the notion in their head that - a paranoid worry that maybe people don't like them.