J. K. Simmons Quotes

"Most of my friends - when I was five, six, seven years old - their dads were working in an auto plant in Detroit until 5:30, and then they were sat in rush hour. They weren't around as much. My dad finished at three o'clock, so he was just around more."

"If you are lucky enough to have a parent or two alive on this planet, call them. Don't text; don't e-mail. Call them on the phone."

"With these big superhero movies, everybody is so tight-lipped about everything, there's a certain amount of just going on faith."

"Everybody does their homework, and we all come together and just knock it out. There are adjustments to make, and if you have actors who are collaborators and who really know how to listen and be in the scene together, than it works out beautifully."

"I never listened to the Grateful Dead as a teen; the only exposure I got was what came through the walls when my sister was listening to them."

"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."

"Things heal. Bad stuff happens, but you go on. Life takes care of it."

"After the second and final time that I got hugely fat in my life and when I lost that weight six or seven years ago, I pretty much decided that I was going to stay in decent shape for the rest of my life."

"I've gone back and forth with fine-tuning the kind of conditioning I'm doing. Sometimes trying to shed weight and getting leaner and sometimes trying to pack on a little more muscle."

"I just saw 'Men, Women & Children' last night, and it's a devastating movie in a lot of ways, but it's so well done, so well acted."

"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."

"Teaching is in my blood."

"When I go back to New York all these years later, I'll walk down Seventh Avenue, and I'll hear, 'Yo, Oz!' In New York, I get recognized for that all the time."

"I did Broadway shows. And I started realizing that this is actually how I'm going to make my living. So maybe I should try to do television and film and make a better living and get an occasional residual check so I can pay a mortgage someday."

"I'm just glad to be able to work."

"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."

"We all want to not repeat ourselves constantly, and explore the limits of our capabilities."

"On 'Oz' one day, I got a chunk of a camera embedded in my head, and I was passed out on the floor geysering blood while the set medic stood over me, freaking out. No help whatsoever. I ended up going to the ER and getting nine stitches in my head - real Frankenstein stitches."

"I read 'Whiplash,' and I wanted to do it."

"If you're doing a prison show, HBO is the absolute best place in the world to be doing that because you're not going to have to do all that, you know, 'Prison Break' stuff where you can't really behave and speak like people do in a maximum-security prison."

"I'm not a fan of any genre but am a fan of movies that are intelligent and/or funny. That goes across all genres: a horror movie, a zombie movie, alien invaders, chick flick, or raunchy comedy. If it's well done, I'm a fan."

"People evolve and it's important to not stop evolving just because you've reached 'adulthood.'"

"It's nice to be number one on the call sheet."

"I have a degree in music, yeah, from the University of Montana. I studied voice and composition and conducting and all that."

"I actually have a degree in music and was aware that music was a tool used in therapy. I didn't realize how far it had come since I was in college in the mid-seventies."

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

"I was not a giant comic book fan as a kid, but to the extent that I did read comics, Spider-Man was always my favorite guy."

"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."

"There's a kind of numbness, a sameness, a lack of motivation in 'good job' culture."

"We're raising a generation of kids who are being overly praised for incredibly minor accomplishments. I think it's counter-productive."