Jeff Bridges Quotes
Actor
Poverty is a very complicated issue, but feeding a child isn't.
Words fall short sometimes.
My brother's my teacher, my mentor, and we both learnt all the acting basics from our father.
Live like you're already dead, man. Have a good time. Do your best. Let it all come ripping right through you.
Imperfection and perfection go so hand in hand, and our dark and our light are so intertwined, that by trying to push the darkness or the so-called negative aspects of our life to the side... we are preventing ourselves from the fullness of life.
I come from a family of teasers myself. My grandfather was from Liverpool, and he had a dry sense of humor, and he would tease us terribly. My brother Beau was so skilled in his teasing that he could get a rise out of me by simply pointing at me.
It's a wonderful metaphor, catching a wave, for how you can look at other challenges in your life.
The way to change the world is through individual responsibility and taking local action in your own community.
Most cynics are really crushed romantics: they've been hurt, they're sensitive, and their cynicism is a shell that's protecting this tiny, dear part in them that's still alive.
We're here for such a short period of time. Live like you're already dead, man. Have a good time. Do your best. Let it all come ripping right through you.
Execution is everything.
With a labyrinth, you make a choice to go in - and once you've chosen, around and around you go. But you always find your way to the center.
My wife holds the kite strings that let me go 'weeeeeee', then she reels me back in.
I'm constantly falling deeper in love with my wife.
I've got to watch my back, so I can't put on too much weight.
Thoughts will change and shift just like the wind and the water when you're on the boat; thoughts are no different than anything else.
Making movies is about creating illusions, and they can be subtle illusions, but it's all a cumulative effect as you make these little tweaks. It kinda adds up to something, hopefully.
Movies are like magic tricks.
Sometimes I think about retiring but not stopping work. Just 're-tiring' - put on some new tires and go on to do something else.
Well, I'm not a big sports fan.
Whenever I work on a part, I look at the world through the filter of the character and I pick things they might use through my observations of real life.
I haven't been to Comic-Con.
The more space and emptiness you can create in yourself, then you can let the rest of the world come in and fill you up.
Technology is such a broad kind of term, it really applies to so many things, from the electric light to running cars on oil. All of these different things can be called technology. I have kind of a love-hate relationship with it, as I expect most people do. With the computer, I spend so many hours sitting in front of a computer.
My wife, whenever I'd go off to work and I'd be kind of anxious, she'll say, 'Remember, have fun.' Oh, I forgot, thanks for the reminder. Because sometimes we do forget. We take it all too seriously and there's a lot of joy to be had wherever you are.
Basically, one of the hardest things about being an actor is getting your first break. I'm a product of nepotism. The doors were open to me. I'd done several movies before I decided what I wanted to do.
That movie, 'Airplane!,' what a landmark film it was. It's a great, great movie.
Sobriety and health is the greatest thing.
My main teachers were my father and my mother and my brother.
Eating ice cream and not exercising is great. The downside is your health isn't so good.
Your part can be the king, but unless people are treating you like royalty, you ain't no king, man.
I found that photography was a great way of relaxing on the set.
Mania is a wonderful feeling.
I don't dig Trump or follow what he has to say, but I find it fascinating that he's surfaced in the political arena. But I'm a Hillary supporter, and I don't go the Trump way.
Sure, I get the blues. But what I try to do, is apply joy to the blues, you know? I don't know if it's a technique, or just being bent that way, being raised by the folks I was raised by.
This idea of how everything is interconnected, and the impermanence of things.. It sums up the human condition to me, and it helps me on my path.
I had a great '70s. I survived it, and that's always good news.
The barn doors are open, and the horses are running out because we've got guns all over the place. It's basically a cold war for individuals: you've got a nuclear bomb, and I've got a nuclear bomb, and the only thing stopping us from using them is the fact we both have them.
I'm very manipulative towards directors. My theory is that everyone on the set is directing the film, we're all receiving art messages from the universe on how we should do the film.
For me and my wife, it was love at first sight.
I'm always busy, but I'm lazy as well.
I like to think of myself as a character actor, though there's some redundancy in that.
I'm used to watching old movies of myself.
It gives me more breadth as an actor and as an artist to not be pigeonholed.
You prep, you prep, you prep. And on the day that you film, you let all of that go. I try to achieve emptiness as much as possible - the Zen thing - to let the deal come out of that nothing.
There are so many things that pop up. If you are paying attention, you can learn every second of the day. Life is my guru.
It can kind of screw up things if you're trying to overwork something.
I'm drawn to the path of least resistance.
One thing I want to do is create something called Ring Around Congress. It would be a state deal and also a national thing, where the kids, as a field trip, will go and join hands around Congress and give the politicians report cards on how they're voting on hunger issues.
I remember being on a black-and-white set all day and then going out into daylight and being amazed by the colour.
What are the aspects of yourself that line up with the character? You magnify those, and the ones that don't match up you kind of kick to the curb.
One of the things that I find so exciting about life is that you're constantly surprised. You never know what's going to happen, and it's certainly like that making movies; every once in a while, one will come along that transcends all of your expectations.
I resist life.
There is one particular argument that I call our 'ancient war.' If it could be summed up in one phrase, it would be, 'You don't get it. You don't understand what it's like to be me living with you.' There is such truth in that statement. None of us can really appreciate what it is like to be the other person, what that point of view feels like.
When I'm working, I'm very purposeful and everything else gets out of focus. Something I've had to work on together with my wife is how to acknowledge each other in the midst of this and keep the relationship going.
I'd done about 10 movies before I decided I wanted to make acting the main thrust of my career.
I've worked with a lot of first-time directors who kind of look to me for ideas and opinions and stuff, and I'm a team player.
Intimacy seems to be one of the major highs of life, whether it's getting to know yourself in a deeper way, or your partner, or the world and the society that you live in.
One of the tough things about being an actor, probably the hardest thing, is getting your foot in the door, and my father handled that for me at a very early age.
For me, growing up, the downside of it was that as a kid you don't want to stand out. You don't want to have a famous father let alone get a job because of your famous father, you know? But I'm a product of nepotism. That's how I got my foot in the door, through my dad.
I consider myself pretty lazy, but I look back and check out the stuff I've done, and I say, 'God, that's a lot of stuff for a lazy guy.' It's a paradox, I suppose, being both things.
I used to read comics when I was a kid.
I am a product of nepotism. I don't think I would have had the profession that I'm in currently... if it wasn't for my dad.
When I was really young, my mom enrolled me in dance classes.
My father Lloyd Bridges worked on a TV show called 'Sea Hunt.' He impressed upon me as a child the importance of taking care of the ocean and working together to do our part to reduce human pollution.
As an actor, a role can be a great excuse not to be in shape. I mean, you wouldn't want to see the Dude with a six-pack, so you eat that Haagen-Dazs. My weight goes up and down.
The wonderful thing about acting is that you can use all of your talents and interests in your work.
My father was so in love with showbiz, all the different aspects - what we're doing here, making the movies, everything about it.
If you're married you'll have tough times.
As filmmakers, we're constantly always looking for something to bring the audience deeper into the reality of the story we're telling.
Generally speaking I would say I enjoy the smaller films more because there's a less sense of pressure and often the material is more unusual.
I wish I were more disciplined.
Yeah, I loved Ray Bradbury.
We're such a funky species. We're so violent, so greedy - this is how we roll. But what are we going to do about it? How do we move forward given who we are? Because situations don't come out of nothing. They come out of certain conditions.
The Oscar nomination is great. It's a great pat on the back. And I like that.
I really try hard not to work, not to engage, because I know what that means. What hard work it is; it takes me away from my family.
Working with my dad was such a gas. We approached the work in a similar way. We only made two films together when I was an adult, Tucker, and Blown Away, but it was so much fun to play with your parent like that.
I'm light and airy.
Fame really works against actors, in a way, because our anonymity is a wonderful thing for us.
It's the same assignment on every part: you want to create a real world, and the tone of it is a little different on each movie. You have to find your tone and work within that to make it as real so the audience can really engage in the story you're telling.
I'm very much into the costuming of any character that I portray and it's one of the great things about making movies is it's a collaborative art form so you get all these artists who are looking specifically about for this instance your character's costume and what that might tell about your character.
I'm a longboard guy.
What I learned most from my father wasn't anything he said; it was just the way he behaved. He loved his work so much that, whenever he came on set, he brought that with him, and other people rose to it.
When I'm performing music, it's like I'm doing a big improv.
I love to paint, do ceramics, photography. I got a lot of side things that I like to do.
I do a lot of ceramics.
Sticking with a marriage. That's true grit, man.
The Widelux is a fickle mistress; its viewfinder isn't accurate, and there's no manual focus, so it has an arbitrariness to it, a capricious quality. I like that.
I first got involved with ending world hunger, and I got hip to the facts about it - what a huge problem it was and how it wasn't a matter of not having food or not knowing how to end it, but it was a matter of creating the political will.
Every time I walk down one of those red carpets, you think I'd be used to it after all these years, but it's like it's happening for the first time.
I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.
I've had really great experiences working with first-time directors. They come at filmmaking with fresh ideas. I've been very lucky that way.
Nowadays, in the contract that actors sign, you have to agree that you're going to do a certain amount of publicity-the hard part they don't pay you for.
As far as the lack of hits goes, I think perhaps it's because I've played a lot of different roles and have not created a persona that the public can latch on to. I have played everything from psychopathic killers to romantic leading men, and in picking such diverse roles I have avoided typecasting.
My website's kind of fun for me. I get to do drawings on that. It's kind of fun.
I had years of partying, and I was kind of surprised and happy I survived it all. Now, being a parent, I look back on it thinking, Oh God, the things you did!
There's kind of a Zen aspect to bowling. The pins are either staying up or down before you even throw your arm back. It's kind of a mind-set. You want to be in this perfect mind-set before you released the ball.
As far as Beau is concerned, we're on the same team, we root for each other. If my parts are slightly more attractive, or are perceived that way by others, he's very content.
Making films is sort of like you're pulling off a magic trick. It's sort of like an illusion. It's not real but you want it to appear real, and all kinds of things go into that, from the clothes you're wearing to the make-up, to the light.
The problem with the designated driver programme, it's not a desirable job. But if you ever get sucked into doing it, have fun with it. At then end of the night drop them off at the wrong house.