Paul Giamatti

“You are absolutely free to describe me as a turtle or something.”

“Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background.”

“The supporting thing can be harder to pop in and out of. The hardest thing is the people who have to come in and play, say, the bartender for a day - that's a lot harder than playing the lea...”

“I was the youngest child and got a lot more freedom than my brother and sister. I used to wander, doing my own thing under the radar, but I didn't get in bad, bad trouble.”

“Now, actors get so familiarized with Eastern Europe. I never imagined I'd get as familiar with Budapest and Prague and places like that in my life.”

“'Capricorn One' just seemed like... wow. That was it, y'know? Nothing was ever going to be better than that movie.”

“With 'Duplicity', I was a little bit like, 'This isn't that hard of a movie.' This isn't like some huge brain trust of a movie. You gotta be a little bit awake to follow the plot, but it's r...”

“Most conspiracies interest me because of the people who are into them, and the lengths they'll go to expose it or the evidence they think they have. All that stuff. There's just something so...”

“It'd be disingenuous to say I don't like attention - I'm an actor for God's sake - and it's flattering and all, but attention was never my big goal. I just like to work and have a good time.”

“Acting can be a really silly thing. It's like playing dress-up.”

“I was an English major at Yale, but I did do undergraduate theater there. And I went to the graduate school for acting.”

“I played old men back in drama school. It's just now that I'm drawing level with the age of the characters I play, but I'm fine with that, and I've certainly never envied people who became h...”

“I wanted to play Zapruder, as he is a man you really don't know much about: a faceless, anonymous figure.”

“I don't think film actors need training, really.”

“I don't think film actors need training, really, but I needed any help I could get.”

“As an actor, to have achieved financial stability is amazing. But I always have this weird fear that I'm not going to get any more work; it's about not having enough money.”

“I suppose there must be some way in which I'm compelled to show some side of myself - or of people - that's paranoid and fraught and beleaguered and downtrodden, just as Tom Cruise wants to...”

“It's funny: most people who recognize me on the subway and stuff - it's much more they think of me as a funny guy. I get much more of people telling me how much I make them laugh, actually....”

“I worked with J. T. Walsh - it was one of the best experiences I ever had - a fantastic actor and a great guy. I was in the last movie that he did: 'The Negotiator.' He died a couple of mont...”

“Growing up, I didn't know where I was headed, except to the grave or maybe to the gutter. I went through wanting to do a lot of things, but acting wasn't one of them.”