Olivia Williams Quotes

I got so lucky on my 'Red Widow' cast. It was just the universe looking out for me that I got those actors. It's a big ensemble cast, a very international cast. I don't know how that happened.

I had to battle it out with all the usual suspects and whatnot and go to the callback. I was lucky that (writer-director) John (Levine) and I were sort of these two white-boy hip-hop-heads from New York. I think that alone got me in the door.

I think I wanted to be on Top Gear from a fairly young age because I loved cars and I wanted to do something on telly because I loved TV. I know that I?m ridiculously lucky

Nothing about my life is lucky. Nothing. A lot of grace, a lot of blessings, a lot of divine order, but I don't believe in luck. For me, luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity. There is no luck without you being prepared to handle that moment of opportunity. Every single thing that has ever happened in your life is preparing you for the moment that is to come.

You can make five massive hits in a row and still not get cast by the directors you want to work with, doing little movies. There are no guarantees. I'm trying to sign up and do movies that I'll be proud of, if it's my last one. That's how I think about it.

I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.

I think we all felt it on this movie - crew and cast. You never know when you're making a movie... no one is saying in the middle of Casablanca that this is going to be a classic. The lead actors had turned it down and I think they wound up with B-list actors at the time.

I grew up in New England. I think I was brought up with the Puritan ethic: that if you worked really hard in life, then good would come to you. The harder you work, the luckier you get. I've come to believe that it's the smarter you work, the better.

Finally, I was called for "The Office" and I was really lucky, because a lot of the shows that I went out for I would work my way up from, like, an audition with the casting director to the director to the producers to the studio, I'd go through seven auditions, and then they'd give the role to a famous actress.

I think whenever you cast someone, someone's going to be critical about it.

After Bottle Rocket, I started getting acting work. People started offering me roles in movies. It wasn't something that I thought about as a kid growing up in Texas. Actually, maybe I would have thought of it as a possibility, but it seemed so crazily far-fetched to think that you could work in movies that I really didn't ever quite imagine it. It was just lucky.

Acting is something that I couldn't recommend to anyone because the odds of it working out are so insane. I don't know how it worked out for me. I had no connections to this industry. I had no ins anywhere.

I don't think I've invented anything. Henry Ford didn't invent the car, and Steve Jobs didn't invent the cell phone, and he didn't invent the digital revolution, but he could adapt, put things together in creative ways. So I think in what we do there's a lot of "let's try it and sees," whether it's a new color or a new style. But we didn't invent cosmetics or lingerie. How we market them - style, color - those are the things that we do, but it isn't pure creation. It's putting together ideas. I truly believe there's nothing really new in the world.

I think it's very important for any actor to eventually produce, and create the projects they want to create. I believe it's all a part of the same art form, which is storytelling.

I think honestly, believe it or not, that Dude, Where's My Car? in a way represents its time better than almost any film made around that.

It's a chain of accidents. When you step into Hollywood, you wind yourself into thousands of chains of accidents. If all of the thousands happen to come out exactly right-and the chance of that figures out to be one in eight million-then you'll be a star.

I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else.

[Tony Richardson ] just liked me, knew I was going to be what he wanted [in The Hotel New Hampshire], and that was the end of it. It was unbelievable.

You just have to be persistent. I think that's one of the biggest things about the model industry and this career is being persistent and believing in yourself and also being ready when the timing is right. So much of it is about timing and luck, so to be ready when you get the opportunity.

I don't really enjoy working in TV, to be completely honest, even though it's incredibly lucrative, I'm just terrified of not being satiated in a myriad of different ways. It's amazing that I get to create every day, as an actor, or a director, or a writer, and I get to do it in a variety of different genres and worlds and characterizations. I think that's the great privilege of what we do, we get to make believe. I get to go to so many different places, try on different occupations, take on different points of view. That's what's always been sort of alluring.

I think it's worse for actors, though, because people have to choose you. As a director, I get to choose the actors, but most of the time, actors have to be chosen in order to work.

James L.Brooks is just a very original person. So that was definitely the luckiest, most important thing that happened to me [meeting him]. Then I guess also meeting Ben Stiller. He cast me in the only thing I think I ever auditioned for and got: Cable Guy [1996]. And that led to us becoming friends.

[On the Gaussian curve, remarked to Poincaré:] Experimentalists think that it is a mathematical theorem while the mathematicians believe it to be an experimental fact.

That I should turn up at the precise moment was one of those extraordinarily lucky breaks which we all need at some time or other during this life, but don't always get.

I don't believe that Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind, or any damn picture that you can name, would be better off in 3D. I think it's a gimmick. I find 3D distracting.