Ben Foster

“I'm so sick of sarcasm and irony, I could kill! Sincerely, the real root of things is love and sacrifice.”

“The heat around young actors burns out. Natural ability and magnetism only get you so far. The rest is hard work.”

“We've all been influenced by American naturalism, and to ignore that entirely would be impossible for me as someone who works primarily in film.”

“'A Streetcar Named Desire' is one of the best, if not the best, modern American plays. It deals with family dynamics, mental health, PTSD, war, and love. It's hard to beat.”

“Transcendental Meditation, for me, has been a way of turning down the outside racket and turning up the bandwidth of instinct, intuition, concentration, attention. On the light ends, it's a power nap. On the strong ends, it's a giant battery, and that battery doesn't run out.”

“It's okay to fail 'cause there's no failure, you're just informing the richness of your experience, and that's - that's the greatest gift you can possibly give yourself.”

“I don't watch most of the movies I'm in. Ever. They're like a bad relationship where, after you break up, you don't want to look over all the valentines.”

“People tell me I look angry. I thought my dad was mad at me his whole life, but it turns out that was just his mug - and I inherited it.”

“The Tour de France is a wicked sport in the way that it's not just man against man or woman against woman; it's not flesh against flesh. It's flesh against machine.”

“I don't think I'm particularly shy. I just don't like being front and center as myself.”

“I'm learning not to hold on so tightly to my solitude. It's not an economical way to work. A driver would call it 'white-knuckling.' If you're holding on to the wheel so tightly, it's gonna lock up your driving. Releasing myself from trying to control everything has been part of growing up.”

“I don't like to rehearse, and the film-makers that I have been drawn to are interested in provoking something between people rather than nailing a scene in advance.”

“Every job is a blessing. Everyone has to take into account what is available. Are you paying rent, who do you get to work with? There are a lot of variables in the job. What I'm drawn to is things that I don't completely understand maybe, and want to get a better feel for it.”

“We've turned film into such an industry that we pursue naturalism just by shaking the camera and cutting the film to ribbons to provoke a bogus sense of documentary. But we haven't done the homework. To push the depth that the Actor's Studio did or the Russian theatres did with their actors is to rehearse, to spend time, to dig, to excavate.”

“My job is all about defending the people that I play.”

“Once you're in the presence of people who have put their lives actively on the line, repeatedly, you're never allowed to complain again. And I do, and we all do. But now I look at things a little differently.”

“There's a lot to learn from the family of a soldier as much as the soldier. Actually, 'warrior' is a better word.”

“We live in this thought web; we identify things and put them away and distance ourselves from them. But to be completely present? That is source, that is art, that is spirituality. And meditation is a way to defy fear and experience that source.”

“I think a long-term TV show is probably not for me, but doing a few years of something could be interesting.”

“I like physical jobs. I like moving my body around. I like testing it. Lets you feel like you've done something.”