Paul Giamatti

“There is something pleasurable for an actor to produce something and not be in it.”

“It is because my dad died suddenly that I became an actor. I thought, I'm going to make money doing this thing I enjoy.”

“I played old men back in drama school. It's just now that I'm drawing level with the age of the characters I play, but I'm fine with that, and I've certainly never envied people who became hugely famous when they were young.”

“The problem with getting injured when you get older is that it takes longer to recover.”

“I definitely had a top-notch education.”

“Growing up, I didn't know where I was headed, except to the grave or maybe to the gutter. I went through wanting to do a lot of things, but acting wasn't one of them.”

“I consider myself an atheist. My wife is Jewish. And I'm fine with my son being raised as a Jew. He's learning Hebrew and is really into it. I will talk to my own son about my atheism when the time is right. But there's a great tradition of Jewish atheism, there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews.”

“'Rosemary's Baby' is a real New York movie, even though you wouldn't necessarily think of it as one, though I do.”

“When I did 'Lady in the Water,' the most exciting thing to me was to get to work with Bob Balaban - I couldn't leave the guy alone. I drove him crazy. He's fantastic and a hilarious guy.”

“I was a big 'Planet of The Apes' fan, so I was really excited about being in it. I had a really good time. I liked wearing all that stuff, and I liked playing the part.”

“The white male is one of the easiest things to be. There's always a job; there's always something for you to do.”

“I think one of the great things about acting is the instant gratification: you just get up and start being a part of the story. The immediacy is something you get really addicted to.”

“I want to be a villain with steel hands or something. I want to be the crazy, world-domination-obsessed villain. I would love to be a Bond villain.”

“I really only started doing film in '97. I mean, before then, I just pretty much did theater.”

“I'm pretty easy to get along with on set, but I'm probably hard on myself.”

“I suppose there must be some way in which I'm compelled to show some side of myself - or of people - that's paranoid and fraught and beleaguered and downtrodden, just as Tom Cruise wants to show that he's terrifyingly upbeat and terrifyingly heroic all the time.”

“The 'Planet of the Apes' movies made me wanna - probably unconsciously - be an actor. Seriously. And The Mummy - and 'Hammer horror' movies. 'Fantastic.' I loved stuff like that, and that stuff probably did more than anything to make me wanna do it.”

“I like playing weird, kind of shady people.”

“In a weird way, I like to find the quirkiness in ordinary things. I like to find what is ordinary in quirky people.”

“I remember when I was at the first showing of 'John Dies at the End' at Sundance, and I was talking to some of the people in the standby crowd who were outside and didn't have tickets. They were just waiting in line to see if they could get in. It was this whole gang of die-hard sci-fi wacko people, and they were just fantastic.”