Thomas Jane Quotes

That’s the great part about television: It’s alive, and it changes and evolves with the way the characters evolve. Stuff that happens to you in your life when you’re shooting a TV show, you have to be careful, because it might end up in the show.

I still collect comics. I still have a great love and respect for the genre.

Terry Malick offered me three parts in ‘The Thin Red Line.’ I was busy shooting other movies while he asked me the first two.

Some of the supporting roles that I’ve done as an actor, I took them because I knew that I would get to watch some of the leading guys in the movies, and also I’d get to work with them.

No, real men don’t watch ‘Deuce Bigelow.’

To me, it’s the kiss of death when you start winking at the audience as an actor. I just never liked it. I don’t like it when we do monologues, looking into the character.

You grow up as an artist in a big city. As James Dean said, you’re going to have one arm tied behind your back if you don’t accept people’s sexual flavors. You know, when I was a kid out here in L.A., I was homeless; I didn’t have any money, and I was living in my car. I was 18.

Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the ’50s and ’60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.

I’m interested in people that don’t always do the right thing, its much more akin to what I know about life.

I want to make movies that I want to see, and what I miss and I’m not seeing.

To stand there and do nothing on film is probably the hardest thing to do.

It’s kind of true that they just start making the same movie over and over again. It’s also true that the times dictate what kind of movies get made and what kind are not. So I’m always looking for something that’s a little fresh and something that I haven’t seen before.

Places where prostitution is legal, you find much better health care, fewer cases of disease and illegal abortions. There’s really nothing to be gained by keeping prostitution illegal.

Harrison Ford – one of my favorite actors – has a wonderful sense of character and depth and uniqueness to him, yet he’s able to just deliver the lines without putting any English on it.

Conformity is painful. You know, it’s too tight. Conformity leads to rebellion. So a desire for happiness is in direct conflict with a desire for freedom.

I spent a lot of years just learning my craft and falling down in front of the camera.

Great directors turn in mediocre work, and first-time directors turn in exceptional work. No matter how good a person can talk about what he wants, you never know. You just have to go with a good story and a script that you like and people that you like to work with.

I can’t stand to see myself act. It just makes me cringe.

My dad was an entrepreneurial businessman, and maybe I got some of his ability.

I loved ‘Boogie Nights.’ That was a great movie, and I had a lot of fun doing that.

If I stay alert, then I can challenge myself, and by challenging myself, that helps me to stay alive and to hopefully take something away from the experience.

A buddy of mine is doing a documentary on decisions, and they’re not based on a ton of logic. It’s mostly how you relate to them emotionally.

There’s no socially acceptable middle age.

People lose people, we lose things in our life as we’re constantly growing and changing. That’s what life is is change, and a lot of that is loss. It’s what you gain from that loss that makes life.

We’re in the doing business, or acting business and creating business. We’re not in the results business, so we don’t have any control over what the result is. My reward comes in the doing of it.

I think what makes us human – is our interconnectedness among people. It’s our ability to form and maintain relationships. It’s the barometer by which we call ourselves human.

That’s what I think is the neat thing about TV: how alive it is and how the writers respond to the stimulus that they’re getting from the actual actors. Whereas a movie is more hermetically sealed.

It’s not that the film is violent, it’s that people have an issue with violence right now.

I just have a respect for my audience. That seems to be pretty logical.

I’m a really huge fan of the old romantic comedies from the ’30s and ’40s… Huge fan. I love all that stuff.