Dustin Hoffman Quotes

You pick projects for the part, the director, and the script. I just want to do different, interesting stuff.

For every big American movie I've done where I was the supporting guy, I've gone back home to Canada to do supporting movies where I was the lead.

I would probably choose supporting roles if I had to make a choice. It's actually a really hard thing to say. It's all on a role-by-role basis, ultimately. I shouldn't be so quick to say that. I feel like you're given greater license to be colorful and eccentric in supporting roles, and that's interesting to me.

I wait and see what scripts come my way and then try and make a decision within the choices that I'm offered. I see what turns up, and if it's something I'd really rather not do, or I think it's too similar to something I've just done, I'll wait and hope for something else.

I don't mind doing genre roles as long as they offer me something substantial.

I'm always looking to play the part that people don't think of me in.

What is so liberating about this whole business is when you see that, you know, big movies are going to come out, huge movies are going to come out, and then you see them up in Malibu in the little Triplex theater a week later, on the scratch negative, and you think...“This is show business. This is the great movie career. And it’s all finding it in the shoebox.”

When my pop career was over, I was scratching my head, thinking, "God, how am I going to do something after I'm forty?" I was in my mid-thirties, thinking I was on the scrap heap.

I also think if you get sort of early success there's always this part of you which feels like, "I need to address the imbalance, I need to kind of earn that success after the fact". I try to find roles that are hard and also, I still find now, even after I've done loads of really random movies, directors are really surprised that I want to play the parts that I want to play. They just assume that you want to only do the honorable good guy lead who saves the day or dies at the end .

I think I made the wrong career choice

I don't want to end my career and then start something. I like to do something while my career is still hot and I've always enjoyed designing.

I don't mind that if I ever star in movies, they'll likely be mine. That's okay, because my great role models - Woody Allen, even Tyler Perry, who is actually one of my role models, even if that seems kind of strange - they do that themselves. And it's great. They build empires, and they're known as having their own voice. I think it's 20 times more fun to act on a set where I feel the freedom to change the dialogue.

Thankfully I've been quite lucky in my career, but it's always good to re-evaluate things and think about what else you want to do.

I don't really ever think in terms of what type of person I'd love to play. I usually just read stuff and can tell.

I'd just like to be in films that I would like to see. I think of myself as an entertainment arsenal. Like I have my acting bazooka and my music machete. And you don't know what I'm going to come at you with.

I think I've been really lucky to keep my career so varied, and to be open. There's safety in repetition, but there's also a trap there.

I think that a lot of the time I don't go for something in particular. I see what comes to me, I filter it out. I never really strive to play a particular character or do a particular genre of film. As long as it's a good script and a great range of people and my character is really interesting I can't see any reason not to do it.

When you're younger, you get scripts that you are too young for and now I'm getting scripts, which I think, "I'm too old for this character." They can always shift things around to make it work and make the ages work. But I'm definitely getting more complex and interesting roles and less what you would expect. So I can experiment more and have a bit more freedom when I'm putting things on tape.

I don't need to get any validation by someone else who sits next to me in first class. If you think a seat in first class makes you a star, then you're not one.

If I were beginning my career today, I don't think I would take the same direction. Television is at a crossroads at the moment. And although I am not up to date technologically, I suspect that somewhere out there people are conveying things about natural history by means other than television, and I think if I were beginning today, I'd be there.

My favorite actors are actors who are enigmatic and mysterious and never make the obvious choice in terms of the projects they do or who they work with or their craft. But I think that the less I know about an actor, the more chance I have of allowing their own persona to kind of slip away so I can get completely lost in the character they're playing, and the more that people think they know about your personal life, the more difficult it becomes to preserve that.

I remember all the kids picking their chosen career paths and I was thinking, If I'm an actor I can be an astronaut and a policeman and a firefighter. At the time I was so young that I actually thought actors were all of those things.

I think I've had a fairly meandering career. Because I did start so young, I think that I've always chosen my parts based on what's interesting to me and what I think would be challenging or fun, or someone I've always wanted to work with or a place I've always wanted to work in or a topic.

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

Anybody who has the illusion that you can have a career as long as I have and be a star is kidding themselves.