Leonardo DiCaprio Quotes

You have to be willing to expose yourself, at least to yourself, to get to some kind of truth about a character.

If you can maintain that integrity in whatever you do, you can't go wrong. That's what I tell my kids, anyway.

I thank God that I left office the same way I came in: with integrity.

I always have a contract with a character. Even when he's unappealing. The contract is to give him his due. To tell his story. And to keep his secrets.

It's very, very important to me, no matter who the person is, to play that person with the utmost degree of truth that I'm able to bring. But playing a character like Jack Sparrow or Willy Wonka, that requires nothing but a degree of responsibility to the intent of the story - responsibility to the film-maker to deliver the goods.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold.

I don't steer towards anything. I steer towards character and truth. If it's funny then so be it. If it's dramatic, so be it. I just steer towards characters.

I guess you can stay sort of true to the story; you don't have to artificially bring the character back from whatever doom you've designed for them, you can tell the story, I suppose, honestly.

I want to work with great directors. I want to work on good material with good actors. I've probably done 20 movies at this point and a lot of independents. It's been an incredible ride and I love it and I'm just going to keep going and doing what I'm doing.

It is of little traits that the greatest human character is composed.

My only job is to act and play the character truthfully and honestly.

The most vital thing for an actor to deliver a great performance is to be honest to the role he or she is playing.

The biggest and the most important thing my mother told me is to be a good actor you first need to be a really good human being and an honest person.

I think all my life's story is condensed in my face. It is neither innocent nor coy. It speaks volumes.

That's where everything starts, as an actor: you've gotta have great writing and great character development, and then you have really great materials to work from.

It was great for that to be my first movie with such a wonderful cast, and such a huge movie. And now I get to do The Fighting Temptations, which is coming out soon-it wasn't much of a character, it was more of a real person, so I got to show more of my acting range.

You want people to go see it by the hoards. And for there to be talk of the possibility of continuing the journey and the ride, if you will, with these characters that we spent so much time honing, and executing this film on all levels, is super exciting.

I don't feel the pressure to deliver an unrealistically great man to the screen; I just want to be honest to who my character is on the page. If I can reflect that and put some heart into him and make him real, then I think I've done my job, and I think that people will like who he is.

For me and my storytelling and the way that I embrace stories in the way that I embrace characters, I desperately needed to know that everything was okay.

In high school, I used to think it was "like sooooo cool" if a guy had an awesome car. Now none of that matters. These days I look for character and honesty and trust.

Each character represents a different color on the big palette of what this ultimate painting is going to look like, who your guy is, and just try to be as honest and simple and real as you can possibly be. The outer trappings are incidental - costumes, period, makeup - all of that is rather insignificant at the end of the day.

Of all people, children are the ones that really understand when there's a truth there for them - an emotional truth. The characters really have to work. Children, as an audience, are very inspirational for me.

Have you ever asked yourself why one person is honorable and another dishonorable; why one is honest, another dishonest; why one is moral, another immoral? Most individuals do not intend to be dishonest, dishonorable, or immoral. They seem to allow their characters to erode by a series of rationalizations, lies, and compromises. Then when grave temptation presents itself, they haven't the strength of character to do what they know to be right.

If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.