Isaiah Washington Quotes

In film, normally what happens is that not many people work more than once. Normally, it breaks couples. It doesn't make them.

I have seen this whole process of films releasing, becoming hits or flops, for too long now to expect things to do well. If I expect a film to do well, then it is for somebody else's sake, not for my own. I do my work, and if you feel that my work is improving from film to film, then I have done my part of the job.

I'm never critical or judgmental about whether or not a movie is any good. The way I look at it, if several hundred people got together every day for a year or so - a number of then willing to put on heavy makeup, wear clothes that weren't their own and pretend to be people other than themselves - and their whole purpose for doing all this was to entertain me, then I'm not gonna start worrying about whether or not they did a good job. The effort alone was enough to make me happy.

I don't watch the movies I've been in. I try to stay as little aware of the final product as possible, because my job doesn't really change.

Actors can become very involved in a role, but for a director or producer, that's your life for many years.

I have been doing this [acting] for a really long time, so I've come to expect things to take a really long time. You get to a place where you do your job and then you dust your hands off and say, "Okay, my job is done. Now, it's in the stars. We'll see what happens." There's nothing I can do to affect it.

Time moves on but Barbara Hershey's doing good and John Heard, they're all people working. I know there were a couple of kids in that movie who I used who have been in other movies since Beaches.

A lot of times you'll do a movie, and you'll be working with adults with families and kids and stuff. There's a level - you guys aren't going to be hanging out every second, you know?

Acting was a way out at first. A way out of not knowing what to do, a way of focusing ambitions. And the ambition wasn't for fame. The ambition was to do an interesting job.

We'd all [with Mike Mitchell] been together at Dreamworks for over ten years, so we all had the same goals.

I never socialized with singers. It's very dangerous if you work with opera... I don't think that in 30 years a singer has entered my apartment.

When I landed in L.A. in early '89, William Morris decided to take me on to see if I could get any jobs. I was cast in a TV movie called Protected Surf, and made $30,000 in four weeks, and I decided I needed to take acting seriously, because I had never made that much money in a year, much less four weeks. That's when I decided I thought I could make a career out of it.

I don't really like to watch myself [in movie] very much, even afterwards. I kind of feel that when I've finished shooting, that's my job done, really. It's not my business what happens to it next. I just do what I do and that's what I love: doing it.

It is more difficult to maintain friendship with people that you work with five minutes ago, than from many years ago. For some reason we've just remained friends, we talk to each other all the time. For a while, for years, we spent New Year together.

Once your acting job is over, you just hope they have a good editor and they put together a good film.

Well, 45-odd years of doing it, so we all pile up the things we like about directors and the things we don't like about directors. And sometimes they're very similar.

I don't know if the scripts are changing so much. I mean, I've been working for almost 25 years and made over 40 films and I worked with my first female director, on a feature, "Planetarium". And it's still the only one.

Ideally you do want people to treat you professionally in return, but not everyone necessarily does that. This acting job - it pays very well and you get to live a wonderful lifestyle, but it's something that I love doing, so I want to work with other people who enjoy it as well ... Maybe if I met the Queen I'd be nervous, though I'd probably be more nervous about doing things the right way because it's a very formal occasion.

You know, this is such a rich time that we've just been involved in, and there's really a job now for historians. Film is still very young. This is the first hundred years of filmmaking. So I think it's important that we have some sense of history and continuity. Especially in film.

It isn't called TV money for nothing. There was a time where I paid my rent by doing theater for years, and I was able to buy groceries and pay my electric bill. I considered myself to be making a living as an actor. This kind of money that we make is a whole other level, of course. But it really is simply the cherry on top of a job and a role that I adore.

Actors are journeymen. We show up for work. We do the job and then we go. What goes on behind the scenes is what goes on behind the scenes.

I was undervalued so I stopped stripping. I was 18 years old and I worked three jobs. This was just one of them, and I really enjoyed performing. It was probably my first performing job ever. I really like to dance, obviously, but then I didn't really love taking the clothes off at the end.

I've always strived to maintain a very healthy, friendly working situation, and lo and behold, it only took forty years, so the next sixty are looking bright. You're dealing with human beings on the cutting edge, and there's bound to be tension. You have to be make room for that, and you can't be too unreasonable, because that's everybody else's role.

I've always been interested in jobs in the NBA. But I've been in this for 20 years and it might be time to do something else.

There's simply no way you can tell a woman you work with that you disapprove of her relationship with her adult child, no matter how much you think it would be better for him to move out.