You're playing a role, but you're still feeling it. You can walk away from it after 'Cut,' but if you're playing a sad or mixed-up person, it's hard to stay in that place for these longish period of times. You kind of have to check out.
— Nick Nolte
In 'Over the Hedge,' I played a bear, and I spent all this time listening to the sounds they make when they fight and mate, when they're angry or happy.
Hollywood is all made up, anyway. Especially the stories and angles that people want to pin on you.
You work at a job, and you reach a certain level, and you're a little satisfied, and you keep going at it a little more, and you finally finish it. You go, 'Ah,' all your dopamine receptor sites are full. You're satiated.
We're very reluctant to change, even though we know that all things change, and especially our relationships are just determined to change.
We're social animals. We've got to get along together. It's in our nature. We're hardwired that way.
I like working with writer-directors because you can solve problems right there.
I've made a lot of mistakes and I don't regret any of them. Sometimes that's the only way you learn.
If you feel you have a film that's valid, you stick your ass on the line.
I never felt comfortable in real life very well. It's always been an awkward kind of thing for me and so when I hit the stage I just sensed freedom. I sensed, 'Here's a place that I can have all the experiences of life and not feel uncomfortable about it.'
Violence isn't really my thing.
It's easier to go somewhere if you've been there before.
I've never been all that comfortable in real life.
I can't get any satiation. My brain is wired in such a way that I - in my research, I probably have a lack of D1 and D2 receptor sites. These are dopamine receptor sites, and satiation is a process that involves a cascade.
If I'm not a successful human being, who I am?
When I was a kid, my dad went to World War II. I didn't know him. I was born in '41.
The only people who ever called me a rebel were people who wanted me to do what they wanted.
Early on I decided that I was going to lie to the press. The best approach to talking about my personal life was to lie.
You have to struggle a bit, hustle a little, and be willing to go bankrupt. Once you're willing to do that, everything opens up and you get the freedom. My joke is that next year, I'll make the first film that costs zero dollars.
Now, there is always a tremendous fear of science and progressing forward into areas of the unknown and it is a valid fear. Some of the genetic alterations of food are a little edgy.
You give up your narcissism, your egotism. That's how you achieve chemistry.
If you get yourself in a hole, you dig yourself out.
Yes, you can get addicted to exercise.
About the only thing that'll stay with you that you can trust all your life is your breath. Your breath will be there at the very last, because when it stops, you will stop.
Peace, truthfully, is how you feel inside.
All American males are failed athletes, and it was big time even if it was Little League. It meant a lot to you.
We're really all alone. We can't ever get inside another person's spirit, and see the world they do. So we are alone in that sense. The only way we have to communicate feelings is through words.
When you are making the one you are doing, you think it is the greatest film going. And then you do another one and it is a great film.
We truly have an ancient part of the brain that was about survival when we were prey but we seem to have gone past prey. We eat everything and nothing eats us.
If you're older you want to tell stories about the pool of human life and living and to communicate, not only to your age group but to do an age group that can begin to understand, that has enough experience of life far beyond the taste of life.
