Alan Ruck Quotes

I always used to say when I was on television that I prefer to be on stage and when on stage I prefer to do television. Typical human condition.

Sometimes I find I'm wearing a divided, split brain in terms of drama and humor.

I had to choose, I'd be so sad. They are flip sides of the same coin. I love both comedy and drama.

I'm really schizophrenic about that, because on the one hand I would say, yes there is, there's something inherently, even violent about it, it's wild and raw and all this.

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

As a kid, I thought of myself as a funny person who secretly wanted to be serious, but now I think maybe I'm a serious person who secretly wants to be funny.

Half of me is this wacked-out comedienne who will do anything for a buck and a laugh. Well, at least for a laugh. But the other half is a lot darker, sadder and more pensive. It's the dark side that feeds the outrageousness and allows it to surface. I think that's true for anyone with comic flair.

The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.

As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

I would say that I have a love-hate relationship with almost everything in my life, including stand-up.

As much as I love boxing, I hate it. And as much as I hate it, I love it.

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.

I have fervently been on both sides of that question at different times.

At home, I'm the silliest cornball who talks way too much and wants to be quiet and left alone at the same time.

Everybody knows someone like that: wonderful, attractive people full of passion and ideals. You envy them, but you know there's a dark side, which is brutal and cruel and violent. That dark side informs what's wonderful about them, and the passion and rage inform the darkness; they're inseparable.

Humans seem to be programmed to think of ambivalent feelings at the same time. That is the driving force behind human beings: to be the warrant of all things and to control other worlds.

I feel like humans, when you're faced with decisions, you can go up and down: duality.

The body is our enemy, and yet is our friend.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.