J. K. Simmons

“I like to act. Every other aspect of show business I find uninteresting.”

“I do think you need to understand a character's motivation and perspective.”

“I started out as a singer and a musician, and I was taught that your job is just to get out of the way of Brahms or Arthur Miller or Shakespeare and convey the brilliance that they created.”

“I am who I am. I have a low voice, and I look like somebody's dad or boss or a police chief, and those roles come my way.”

“I want to be like Bradley Cooper when I grow up.”

“I never had intention of coming to New York or L.A. and actually doing more than scraping by - you know, doing plays. And as my career sort of progressed of its own volition, I did come to New York.”

“I come from a family of educators. My sister is a college teacher. My dad is a college teacher, but first a junior high teacher.”

“I went from being a jock to a hippie. It was a very clear-cut decision. I had to be one or the other. I had to forsake that other aspect of myself. Or thought that I had to, which is regrettable. Quickly, I was back in the pine trees with the hippies, listening to my Jimi Hendrix and my Janis Joplin and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.”

“Screaming is hard after a while.”

“Being evil is easy.”

“I like to stay home. I don't want to be away shooting in Europe for six or eight months at a stretch.”

“The best complement I ever got from the public or producers or directors is that I just totally blend in and become the character and they don't notice me and that the play happens or the movie happens or the TV show happens.”

“When we were shooting 'Oz,' my wife was doing 'Beauty and the Beast' on Broadway, singing and dancing. It was an interesting dichotomy in our house.”

“My understanding, from what I've learned so far about Commissioner Gordon, is that he's the older guy with the mustache who relates with our hero in a certain way.”

“Almost every character I've ever played - and sometimes this is very conscious and sometimes it's not - I need to find what they love.”

“I was studying music in college. I was singing, I was doing operas and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and then I was offered a job as the music director of the Bigfork Summer Playhouse, in Bigfork, Montana.”

“I read a lot of scripts, and there's a lot of good writing and a lot of OK writing and a lot of crappy writing. And even with the really good writing, it doesn't necessarily speak to me.”

“Education is very important to me.”

“I've been so blessed to have the opportunities that I've had.”

“For me, if the words are good on the page, the rest of it comes from spending some time with the script, and not like you're learning lines but absorbing what the script has to offer.”