David Ogden Stiers

“Very often when I go in to meet for movies or pilots, I'm put on videotape. I hate the notion that that tape is going to sit on a shelf and never get better.”

“It's rare to be treated like a friend you haven't met in a Hollywood meeting.”

“I think the preservation of orchestras and what they do is worth expending all the ways there are to reach out to people who might not otherwise go.”

“I am certainly not a mainstream religious man.”

“I had a meeting in LA in which they took a really overstuffed hour and a half. It was as close to old Hollywood as I remembered it in the last 20 years.”

“A lot affects the outcome. It boils down to scheduling and the commitment of the network.”

“There are a couple of roles I haven't played that I want to. I would love to play Shiloh.”

“Every time I hear, Cut. Print, something cold and electrical goes off in my head, because I'm never going to change that film.”

“Kids now are so used to surround sound and the power in theater speakers, that the concert hall is a disappointment to them.”

“In television you go in with this operating system that it is a crapshoot.”

“What we have to get clear to kids is that when you offer your stillness and open yourself to the experience of music, it pays you back more than you give.”

“Something happens to us all when we experience something as a unit that doesn't occur when we're on our couches or holding our little portable DVD players.”

“I am not a long-run actor. I admire actors who can do that.”

“People ordinarily don't think of their orchestras as important as we'd like them to be. People don't care about their friends and neighbors who sit down to commit excellence three or four times a year, but they will go see the tall bald guy with three names from television.”

“I've played Lear three times, I would love to do it again.”

“People are nice enough, but you can hear the giant tick of the second hand. People are so harried.”

“My father, who died a few years ago, was a good, simple, very honest man. His faith and affection for his family was just unassailable, without question.”

“The simple act of sitting down and playing something enormously complex and spiritually uplifting on a harpsichord just bores kids to tears. There's no sizzle, there's no grab. But it's the great lesson of serious music, that it invites you to listen, rather than demands that you listen.”

“I love pulling people into concert halls who might not otherwise go and getting their ears tuned.”

“When something really extreme happens, you have to find a way to embrace that and include it in how you think about the character. Sometimes it's not easy.”