John Hawkes

“It's probably odd for someone to read an interview where the interviewee is worried about exposure while they're talking in an interview.”

“Certainly I've had the experience of thinking a person was one thing, and finding out they were another.”

“It's nice to sometimes get things out of life, rather than stealing from other artists. I'm trying to steal from the real people.”

“I have to be careful of what TV shows I choose, particularly ones that have commercials in them, because it's going to be a different kind of television show.”

“You don't really ever think you're that crazy person you're playing.”

“I understand why people achieve a level of fame and disappear, I never understood it before, but it's an attractive prospect to walk away from it all.”

“I guess you can say that every actor is a 'character actor' on some level. But I think some actors have a wider range. I think that's how you get that mantle.”

“People have said unkind things and you kind of have to, if you happen to read it, you have to just, you know, move on.”

“There's a lot of skeletons in my closet!”

“As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.”

“In the time between when you first read a script and are offered the role and the time when you begin to shoot, I really love putting in the time and work on that and getting a solid backstory to a character and researching all that I can about what that person does for a vocation or their upbringing or where they're from.”

“Hitchhiking was such a pure form of existence. You'd wake up in the morning, and you'd have no idea what your day was going to be. And that's something I've never been able to shake. I loved that.”

“If a musician wants to be an actor, everyone thinks that's pretty cool. But if an actor wants to play a song, even if they've been doing it for 40 years, that's bad news.”

“Even the small amount of infamy I have makes me uncomfortable - on a personal level and on a professional level.”

“Being a kid, as all kids do, you feel out of place or like kind of a freak. You wake up feeling like your head got put onto someone else's body that day.”

“As an actor, you don't often get a chance to know exactly the impact of what the audience is seeing, even though you can ask where the frame is. A move that feels tiny can be huge, and vice versa.”

“'The New York Times' thing... I think any actor would be thrilled to be profiled in that paper.”

“My fear now is of cliche, of complacency, of not being able to feel authenticity in myself and those around me.”

“I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.”

“Some friends of mine bothered me for a long time about getting on the social networking pages. They were close friends that I liked to mess with, and I think that I kind of enjoyed for a while that it bothered them so much. Now they've just kind of given up.”