Kevin Bacon Quotes

Show me an actor who doesn’t want to be famous, and I’ll show you a liar. Later, you realise that there’s more to it than just the acquisition of fame, and money and girls. But that is what drives them and was what drove me, initially.

I don’t have to do the lead. If I dig a part, I’ll do it.

Being with Kyra is so natural for me; it’s the easiest aspect of my life. I know that I don’t need a beach or room service to be happy.

Do you want to be the guy with a game named after you or be the one with 18 Oscar nominations?

I’ve made three studio albums and one live one with my brother. It’s melodic singer-songwriter acoustic-rock music.

I did a year of ‘Guiding Light’, and I was going to be a movie actor or a stage actor, but not a TV actor. That just wasn’t going to happen. And obviously, things changed so remarkably.

I’m always happier and a better actor when I can really lose myself in a character and become somebody else.

When I go home, I try to raise my children with honesty and integrity and teach them to take care of the world and of each other.

Keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t be afraid of fame.

‘Gogglebox’ is a show where you watch people watch television.

To me, the struggle is to try to make a less-well-written or less-well-rounded character and find who they are. If you really get it, and it’s all on the page, then it’s really just gonna pop out at you.

I’ve been in silly movies and romantic movies and historic movies.

There’s the most resistance to an actor singing. It’s like I’m being disloyal to my industry.

If you look at films about becoming a man, coming-of-age movies are made with 12-, 16-, 40-, 50-year-olds… For a guy to feel like he’s a 100 percent grown-up is almost like giving up. Like admitting that you’re on your way into the grave.

‘The River Wild’ was great, with Meryl Streep. That guy was really a bad dude who was ultimately sort of fundamentally impotent in a weird way. That was kind of interesting.

The way I analyze a script, I don’t look at how many days I have off. I see how far they’re going to push me. That’s just the way I am.

I have fond memories of Chris Penn, who’s sadly not with us. He always made me laugh – it was great to be with him.

There is a lesson there about greed and it is a lesson I am willing to learn as well. Has it made me a distrustful person? I don’t think so. But we probably look a bit more carefully at our financial situation now.

There is this idea that your social media platform is the secret to success, but no one has quite proven that to be true, if you ask me.

From the time I signed on to ‘The Following,’ things have already vastly changed in the entertainment world in general. It’s an adjustment for me.

One of the top comments I get from people is, ‘Oh my God, you’re like a regular person!’ That’s kind of a bizarre thing to live with. I know a lot of famous people, and their lives may not be regular, but they are regular people.

I like playing complex, interesting characters. Sometimes I don’t think there’s much of a strong line between right and wrong for a character. Every character is somewhere on a moral spectrum.

A moustache is actually the one thing I really can grow. One of the bad parts about my facial hair situation is that I can’t grow sideburns. I’m happy to still have my own hair on my head, but I can’t grow any sideburns. If you ever see me with sideburns, they’re not real.

I like to play characters, man. I almost don’t even think of them as good guys or bad guys. I know that’s a hard thing to realize, but I really just think of them as characters.

Some people have therapy, some people are alcoholics or they’re in AA. Some people jump out of planes on weekends or find ways to release this kind of thing. And for me, it’s acting. I find acting very therapeutic for whatever it is.

Whether it’s my age or my misspent youth, sometimes I forget whether I’ve worked with somebody or not.

Certainly, network television in general relies a little bit too much on keeping people focused and emotional and scared and pushing the envelope by building wall-to-wall music.

There’s this American dream to put enough away that you can golf and build a birdhouse or just be in a Barcalounger watching football all day. I’ll never be that guy. And I’m not really sure the people who have that are all that happy. Our desires as a man are to work, plow ahead, and overcome conflict.

As I was coming up on the stage, there was one source that could make or break you, the New York Times. Inevitably there would be one actor singled out for a better review, or worse, than somebody else. The effect of that was cancerous, divisive.

I’ll be honest with you. My kids don’t watch my movies and never have. I can maybe name a film one hand that they’ve seen, actually, all the way through.

Somebody with a billion followers can tweet, ‘See my movie,’ and it can still tank. Followers don’t always translate into success because I think people are too savvy. When something takes off, it’s because people are connecting to it – not because someone with a lot of followers says to care about it.

I’m new to this TV thing, at least as an actor. It’s a challenge. The thing I have to adjust to is the changing directors every week. That’s new for me. I tend to establish with a director – and then two days later, he’s gone.

If you take me out of it, I find ‘six degrees’ to be a beautiful concept that we should try to live by. It’s about compassion and responsibility for everyone on the planet.

The whole industry is changing because so many people watch things on DVR, and they watch things on other platforms, and I think everybody is kind of scratching their heads about how this is going to play out.

My brother is the lifelong musician; he made the choice to do that when we were very, very young kids. I remember him playing in bands and listening to the music he was writing in the house – he’s nine years older than me.

A good director creates an environment, which gives the actor the encouragement to fly.

Things could be worse. You remember that, and you go on with your life.

I do better on the first three takes; I won’t be better at 20 takes.

We are being choked to death by the amount of plastic that we throw away. It’s killing our oceans. It’s entering into our bodies in the fish we eat.

I was in the first ‘Friday The 13th,’ and that was a microbudget horror film.

There are people who tell you to shut up because you’re just a celebrity, but pundits, talking heads, they’re every bit the celebrity and a lot of them aren’t any more qualified than the average man on the street.

Kevin’s mind goes to extremely interesting places. Every time we get a script, I go, ‘Oh my God, I really didn’t see that coming’.

With a lot of actors, you’ve got to chip through the surface to see who the real person is.

I’d love to be a pop idol. Of course, my groupies are now between 40 and 50.

I always have a suitcase ready to go. My wife and I are both very much like this. We’re both vagabonds, and we have been since the time we were married.

L.A. kind of scares me.

My father was into fame and leaving his mark. He was a city planner, sort of a genius in that world, the Robert Moses of Philadelphia. He was on the cover of ‘Time’ once, and I remember going to his office and seeing, like, two hundred copies, which he would hand out to people.

I started making movies in 1977, and I didn’t even think about the idea that I would ever be on a television show. Once I finished the ‘Guiding Light,’ I was like, ‘I’m done with television!’

‘X-Men: First Class’ was fun.

I used to live on Riverside Park in New York, on the Upper West Side.

There are very few things that are purely conceptual without any hard content.

I want to see the numbers that prove that show-business marriages are any less successful than other marriages. It’s just very public when they fail.

If I’m in a situation where someone doesn’t recognize me and treats me like everyone else, I’m not used to it.

I think we all have a lot of darkness in our bellies. As an actor, the challenge of tapping into that, reaching down into that sadness or anger, is very therapeutic.

I still want to make Kyra proud of the person I am – father, husband, actor, musician.

I don’t watch the movies I make, so I haven’t seen ‘Footloose’ since it came out. You see this young, hungry actor, it’s pretty fun. I was the only one they screen tested. It was an attempt by the director and producer to talk the head of the studio into hiring me because they didn’t want me.

I like to hike and cook. I enjoy furniture and design – not making it, just looking at it. I’m always kind of trying to spread my interests around and try new things.

I always have to make it as clear as I possibly can that fame is 99.9 percent good.

I just let the work speak for itself. An actor is not afraid to take risks; to put on different hats; to be a good guy, a bad guy, a victim, an abuser. There are all kinds of people in the world, and playing them is what acting is all about.

I wasn’t going off to New York to be more famous than my father, but in retrospect, that certainly was driving me. He was famous in Philadelphia, but it was also really important to him to be famous. And to a certain extent, I got some of that, even though there were parts of it that horrified me.

Before Footloose, the things I’d done weren’t cute. In Diner I was an alcoholic.

I’d always tried not to worry about the size of the role or the size of the film.

I would say invisibility would be sort of a fun power to have just to see what it was like to move through the world and not be looked at.

When it comes to music, it’s my clothes, it’s my guitar, it’s my voice, it’s my song.

When it happened to us and it was all gone overnight, we said, ‘We are in this together, we are healthy, our children are healthy and we can work’.

The greats are ‘The Shining’, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, ‘Don’t Look Now’, ‘The Exorcist’ – those movies were not really slashers: they were about psychological terror and had very deep emotional backdrops. If we do our best, ‘6 Miranda Drive’ can be that kind of a movie.

The business that people do in LA on the social level is amazing. You go to a restaurant, bump into this guy or that guy. The next day you get a call, and they want you in their movie.

Clint Eastwood has always been a hero.

I’m an actor. It’s what I do. It’s what I chose to do with my life when I was a little boy, and that’s what Im still doing. I like to work. I came up with a work ethic, and that’s just what I do.

I don’t read my own reviews and I haven’t for probably 15 years. I read other people’s reviews, though.