Liev Schreiber Quotes (45 Quotes)

There's the private persona and the public persona and the two shall never meet.

My grandfather was an athlete who worked as a butcher by day, but at night he taught himself to paint and play the cello. He was a very cultured man,

I had wanted so much to make this a European film. Jonathan and I compared stories of our grandfathers. I wanted to show their survivors' sense of humor If you believe your life is excrement then you either drown in it or transcend it with irony. That's a distinct Eastern European trait.

I didn't know how to begin to mourn him. He had been the pivotal figure in my life.

I really liked the idea of delivering an American character who defied some of the cultural cliches we have been exporting to the rest of the world. A character who was awkward, vulnerable, young, innocent, neurotic, somewhat alien,

It's the difference between instinct and intuition,

I was out of my head. I was really frantic, ... I guess I was always under the misconception that a director makes the film, and it's not true. A director directs the people who make the film.

Everyone assumes that novelists are smarter and more interesting. They're generally smarter and more interesting, but they're often very short. So it kind of cancels all the smart and interesting stuff out.

I have a pathological memory problem and when he died I was very angry and worried that somehow I wouldn't remember him,

I manage to hide in my movies.

It was really overwhelming to see the way that people responded - the kind of class and grace, and compassion and support, and resourcefulness that people showed. It was almost like rather than knocking us down, Sept. 11 kind of stepped us up. I was very impressed with that. It showed me that there's really nothing we can't handle.

My publicist told me not to talk about politics but, yes, I think we have a president who stole the election.

It's a survivor's sense of humor, maybe even a Jewish sense of humor. Because of the difficulty of life for many Eastern Europeans - the pogroms, the Revolution, the Holocaust - their humor is broad and aggressively and ridiculously comic. It also trigger

It was incredibly cathartic after spending eight hours in an editing room being frustrated by the filmmaking process to be able to go out and say the 'F' word 104 times,

Alex's grandfather in Illuminated, ... is a survivor through and through who carries a very dark secret inside himself and masks it with rage and humor.

We talked about our grandfathers and their senses of humor and our sense of culture and history, and we had a lot in common,

I just couldn't think of anybody in show business with better eyes.

This movie questions whether the tragedies and disasters that are happening are man-made or do they collectively add up to something wicked this way comes, ... Fear has a tremendous power both socially and politically now. What's more relevant than anxiety of the unknown.

When you have this structure of a stranger in a strange land, it is essential that the place and characters be really authentic.

As soon as you know what you're doing, you're doing it wrong.

I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.

I can sense that there's something that I need to decompress from, but I just don't have the time right now. I think the trick is not to look back. If I stop and realize what I've been through, I think I would probably faint.

I really don't think there is anybody in the business with better eyes than Elijah Wood.

I think that for me, I'm in a great place. I work all the time, I hang out in fancy hotels, and I do interviews all day, and I get free coffee.

You can think about your career or you can think about your job. I like to think about my job.

He was very supportive of me, ... He saw every single play I did in New York. I'll never forget looking out into the audience and watching my brother, who was 40 years younger than my grandfather, sleeping in his chair during some of my early plays. My grandfather Alex never fell asleep.

I am so used to being able to express myself from being an actor. So when people don't understand me, I'm just completely lost.

Ever since I was a little kid I was obsessed with films, and I always wanted to make them,

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

Style, no matter how outrageous it is, is still an expression of someone's personality. And my personality is somewhere stuck in the classics.

Some actors need to be rattled and some need to be focused.

I didn't think that a career in theater was very realistic so I thought the only thing I could make money doing and still be somewhat artistic was, god help me, advertising.

My model of casting comes from Eastern Europe and part of the ideology there is that culture and place are essential,

I loved the writing part of it, but the learning curve on the actual filmmaking was steeper than I thought,

It's good to overexpose yourself with work. But don't expose yourself too much with the press.

It's strange - well for me anyway - to be inundated with all this attention, and as a couple we have to struggle to keep our personal life personal.

If this wasn't as important to me and my family, I wouldn't have done it, ... I'm done, but today I went to check the mix. You're never really done.

Hamlet is a remarkably easy role. Physically it's hard because it tends to be about three hours long and you're talking the whole time. But it's a simple role and it adapts itself very well, because the thing about Hamlet is, we all are Hamlet.

I live with an 18-month-old Jack Russell named Chicken. He moved in about 15 months ago, and it was very hard at first because I work a lot and he doesn't.

You should never ask actors about politics.

I did everything that my father did in trying to find him because I didn't live with him,

If you fall in love with somebody you're working with, fine, but wait till your project is over.

I want to forget what I've learned about the character, but the reality is that you can't, because you've absorbed it. It's there in that moment when you need it. The hard part is to trust it.

I know I have the potential to care in the way that he did because of this film,

There's something insanely sweet about him. And he is a very, very, very good-natured person. He is a truly kind person. I put him in some of the worst circumstances that you could put a human being in and there were homeless guys who I'd hired to be in the movie because I liked the way they looked, and they complained sooner than Elijah did.