Scott Glenn
As human beings, we anthropomorphize way too much. God's not a person. God, for me, is a power that lies outside the definition of time and space.Collection: Space
In terms of working out, I'm in the gym, maximum, twice a week, but for a pretty intense period of time: two or two and a half hours nonstop. Most of the exercises are body weight. We're talking pull-ups, chin-ups, decline rows, elevated push-ups.
I've never been bitten by a shark, though God knows I had to poke a lot of them in the nose.
I love poetry - just to read it and be around it.
Someone asked me what part of the body is the most important to be strong - it's the big toe. The big toe especially, and the inner front-third of your feet, are what give you balance and will make you infinitely better at any sport, any physical activity and, as you get older, will keep you from falling.
There is no such thing as too much rehearsal. When Daniel Day-Lewis told Steven Spielberg he needed a year for 'Lincoln,' I understand that.
I've been doing martial arts since I was 9.
I'm sure one reason I became an actor is my basic unwillingness to live one life.
Acting gives you cosmic permission to take a trip in movies that lasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until the film is finished.
I knew that acting is like anything - you learn from doing it.
For me, the first thing that I respond to - whether it's doing a play or movie or television or anything - is just the character. Is this a guy whose shoes I want to walk in for the next 12 days or six months?
I used to be an open-spear fisherman, and if you're looking for fish, you're never going to see them. In an almost meditative state, you have to pick out anomalies, something out of the ordinary.
Carrying law enforcement ID connects you with those who do the same and separates you from those who don't. There's an implicit trust that you will serve even if means risking your life.
I've always been addicted to adrenaline.
Rodeo riders are the last of the true chivalrous groups of people. It's a place where the competition is really pure.
There really, truly is a code that rodeo men and women have you can't find anywhere else. There really is a code. It's a sense of tribalism.
I don't think rodeo is cruel at all. Bullriding is the only man-animal event that makes sense.
When I was a kid, I had scarlet fever. I wasn't supposed to have survived it. When I got out of bed, my bones were so soft that they kind of bent. I had a slight limp for probably three years after.
One of the sports I do - my wife thinks I'm nuts - is open-water spear fishing, what we call blue-water hunting. We get in a boat, and we go offshore, normally about 30 miles. So when you jump off the boat, there are no reefs, and the bottom is no longer fifty or a hundred feet: it's thousands of feet. It's sort of like being in outer space.
My life is stupidly physical.
'The Leftovers' is my favorite job I've ever had in my life, anywhere, ever. It is one of the greatest TV shows ever made.
Working with film directors helps me grow, but nothing like the incremental jumps I make onstage.
I worked as a truck driver, carpenter's assistant, doing whatever it took to keep bread on the table for the family.
I got into an argument with someone because I said I think 2Pac will be regarded as a great poet. They said he was just a punk gangster. People said the same thing about Francois Villon, and he's now considered the best French Romantic poet of all time.
Good balance makes you a better dancer, musician, actor - anything.
The more time you spend with any character, whether it's from a comic book universe or a really naturalistic universe, the more time you spend, the more that character just becomes another aspect of yourself.
I feel like, in some ways, I couldn't be a luckier actor to have Stick from 'Daredevil' and Senior from 'The Leftovers.' Two really different, incredible parts to do. I'm just lucky.
In my life, all of the best things that have happened to me have almost invariably been accidents or fate.Collection: Fate
The hard part about playing 'chicken' is knowing when to flinch.Collection: Knowing
My metaphor for acting in movies - not on stage because it's completely different on stage - is to put colors on an easel for the director to paint his own painting with in the editing room, long after I've left. You buy me for red and black, so I better give you really great red and black, but if I can give you purple, pink, green and brown too, I will.Collection: Color
They say God looks after kids and idiots, and I think actors are probably a combination of the two.Collection: Kids
The full extent of the problem of hunger is not obvious to most of us. We see the homeless, but there are a great number of working poor, struggling to survive, who don't have enough money to put adequate food on the table. We must find a solution to this ever-increasing problem - and quickly.Collection: Struggle
At my age, to still be able to do parts that are super physical, I'm lucky. I'm doing more fun stuff now than I ever have in my life. I'm just really fortunate.Collection: Fun
You can't expect a man like me to be loyal to just one woman.Collection: Men
J.J. Abrams wanted me to do a part in Lost and we probably had three meetings, and I finally turned it down, but it wasn't because I didn't like television or Lost, although I think I said to J.J., "I don't want to be in Hawaii and have an insurance person tell me I'm not allowed to go free dive and spear fishing." That would be the worst kind of torture in the world. But I don't hate television.Collection: Hate
Damon Lindelof said, "There are three kinds of prophets - crazy people, like the Guilty Remnant, false prophets, who just want money, sexy and power and use that to get it, and real prophets - and you're a real prophet in 'The Leftovers'. The voices that speak to you never tell you a lie." And I said, "Name me some real prophets." He said, "Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad." I said, "Which one am I?" And he said, "None of them. You're probably closer to Moses than anyone."Collection: Sexy
I'm the most computer illiterate human being that ever lived. My grandkids do everything for me, and then they say, "I won't even explain it to you, grandpa, 'cause you won't get it."Collection: Grandpa
I often give my wife Carol scripts I'm offered and want her opinion - because she's a really smart lady, and she's got nothing to do with this business, so I get the audience's point of view.Collection: Smart
I'm not a comic book guy. I've never been to Comic-Con. I don't know anything about that. It's a whole different world.Collection: Book
That one long scene in the Leftovers I have with David Gulpilil was seven pages long. When we finished it, Mimi Leder said, "I thought you were gonna do this in bits and pieces. You just did the whole thing." And I literally couldn't remember the scene. It wasn't that I was in a trance. I said, "Just keep shooting takes until you see what you want." In 48 years of acting, which is also how long I've been married, that had never happened to me.Collection: Long
Very often, when you're playing people who love each other, or who hate each other, you manufacture those feelings. You have to do that a lot.Collection: Hate
Very rarely do actors, even with features, get to live with a part for that long and really dig into it.Collection: Long
What I didn't realize about television was that's true of acting, as well. You have that space of time to develop who you are, and you can use more and more of yourself. The lines between that character that I'm playing and myself become more and more blurred and, after awhile, they just disappear, altogether.Collection: Character
We were talking about television one time, and Damon Lindelof said he felt that, if Ernst Hemingway was writing for media, he would write feature films, and Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoyevsky would write television series because there are some stories you just can't tell in two hours.Collection: Writing
The third season of the Leftovers came along and Damon Lindelof sent me the script to Episode 3, and I called him up and thanked him for one of the greatest gifts I've been given. I had that script for almost two months, in the mountains in Idaho, before I even got on a plane and flew to Australia and went to the outback. He also told me to learn about the indigenous people in Australia and learn how to play a didgeridoo. It was just great. It was probably, in many ways, the best acting experience I've ever had.Collection: People
I love the way Damon Lindelof writes. It's almost like he was channeling me and he had my voice, even though the territory that those lines cover is unpredictable, and goes from raw emotion to laugh out loud funny but always true.Collection: Writing
I watched some of Lost series. And I realized that the character they wanted me to play didn't really come in for a long time. It would have just been the wrong thing for me to do.Collection: Character
There was a play that was written by who I think is America's greatest playwright, and he wrote a small part in it for me. It was going to open in Chicago, and then go to New York. But then, he died. It was Arthur Miller. That was the reason I turned Lost down.Collection: Thinking
I never felt like I was on solid ground, emotionally.Collection: Felt
If you're going to be in a series and it has commercial breaks... People say, "Oh, there's a difference between cable and network," and my response to that is, "No, there's a difference between sponsored and not sponsored." That's the thing.Collection: Differences