Joseph Gordon-Levitt Quotes

Quotes by and about Joseph Gordon-Levitt

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Gordon-Levitt: "I've been working as an actor since I was a little kid, and I've always been fascinated, and a little horrified, by the way people relate to images they see on screen. Sometimes I feel I am seen as a thing more than a person, and I don't think that's unique to actors. I think everyone is subject to that kind of pigeonholing."

Gordon-Levitt: "Whether you're making huge blockbusters or little independent films, the purity of intention is what attracts me to ... a filmmaker."

Gordon-Levitt: "If you are ... busy trying to fit yourself into a mold, you're going to miss what's actually beautiful about life, which is what makes people unique, not what makes everybody the same. ... You're not connecting."

Gordon-Levitt: "Doing what people think you're supposed to do is never fun."

Gordon-Levitt: "Look at how powerful [the] media can be ... how ... [it] can convince you of something. ... That's important to keep in mind next time the news is telling you something as fact. Keep in mind how the medium is the message and how the form in which that message is delivered can manipulate the truth."

Gordon-Levitt: "It always turns my stomach a little when, because I'm in movies and on TV, people sometimes treat me as if I'm somehow different from, even above, a normal person."

Gordon-Levitt: "Supermarket tabloids and celebrity gossip shows are not just innocently shallow entertainment, but a fundamental part of a much larger movement that involves apathy, greed and hierarchy. Celebrity doesn't have anything to do with art or craft. It's about being rich and thinking that you're better than everybody else."

Gordon-Levitt: "[Commercials are] not real acting. ... It's embarrassing what they make little kids do in commercials."

Gordon-Levitt: "The sentiment [the Occupy movement] embodies is timeless: Don't be greedy, share. It's really exciting that this movement is giving voice to these sentiments and that people are willing to stand up for it."

Gordon-Levitt: "Obviously Edward Snowden did break the law, and he admits that he broke the law, but then there are examples of people who break the law who aren't necessarily doing the wrong thing. One example I've thought of is Rosa Parks. Back in her day, it was illegal where she lived for a black person to sit on the front of a bus and she was told to go sit on the back of the bus and she refused. At that time that was breaking the law and half the country thought she was a criminal, but we look back and now we're grateful that she broke that law."

Gordon-Levitt: "I left [my meeting with Edward Snowden] knowing without a doubt that what he did, he did because he believed it was the right thing to do, that he believed it would help the country he loves. Now, as he would say, it's not for him to say whether it was right or wrong. That's really for people to decide on their own."

GQ Magazine: "We got in his aging vehicle, whose enviro-conscious reputation he calls 'a sham' and whose make and model he asked me not to mention. 'Don't put this in the story,' he said, even as I told him I was going to. 'It's so boring. I hate cars. Let's say it's a magic carpet!'"

Marlow Stern: "[He is] equipped with an unbridled - and infectious - enthusiasm."

GQ Magazine: "[Christopher Nolan] recalls being struck by the actor's 'youthful energy' when they first met: 'He has tremendous charisma and that incredible kind of positivity that can't be faked.' Which makes him perfect, of course, for Commissioner Gordon's protégé [in 'The Dark Knight Rises']. 'We really needed somebody with a sense of idealism to contrast with Gordon's weariness,' Nolan says of Gary Oldman's role. 'I thought of Joe first and foremost.'"

GQ Magazine: "'A little bit of a contrarian' is the way Zooey Deschanel describes the Joe she first met on the set of the 2001 movie Manic. 'Very intellectual. Very, very serious and very intense.' Joe, then 19, had just decided to quit acting and was headed to Columbia University to read Nabokov. Deschanel, meanwhile, had just dropped out of college to become an actor. 'We would joke about that. I would be like, 'You hate movies.' And he'd be like, 'You hate books.''"